Due to an implementation bug in the Go client, the difficulty increases steadily regardless of hashing performance.
Configurations affected: every Go to client version v1.0.x, v1.1.x to release and develop your branch. This bug was introduced in releases with recent updates and commits. https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/commit/7324176f702a77fc331bf16a968d2eb4bccce021 This applied to the affected client versions. All miners running the aforementioned versions are affected and are advised to update as soon as possible.
What could happen: High
Severity: middle
effect: As block time increases, the difficulty increases exponentially.
Details: Due to a bug in the Go client, the difficulty of the next block increases steadily as timestamp of the new block = timestamp + 1 of the previous block, regardless of the actual time when mining. This increases the difficulty regardless of hashing performance.
Impact on expected chain reorganization depth: doesn’t exist
Suggested workaround: doesn’t exist
Improvement measures taken by Ethereum: Provide hotfix as below:
If you’re using a PPA: sudo apt-get update Then sudo apt-get upgrade
If you use brewing: Brewing Updates Then Reinstall Brewing Ethereum
If you’re using Windows binaries: Download the updated binaries from: release page
If building from source: child pull next make a geth (Please use the master branch. 587669215b878566c4a7b91fbf88a6fd2ec4f46a)