ETH's Difficulty Timebomb and Network Woes with ICOs

ETH has a block gas limit and its blocktime has slowed significantly with its looming difficulty timembomb. They generate 5 coins per block, right after the DAO fork, ETH was the longer chain than ETC and continued to be, but ETC postponed their timebomb and doubled the number of PoW mineable coins and surpassed ETH in number of blocks in early May. Now the ICOs are bumping heads against the imposed PoW limits ETH has in place. They need to move more quickly toward their Casper/PoS model or these big ICOs will continue to cause network problems. Would not be surprised to see ETH move their Proof of Authority mining model from Rinkeby testnet to Mainnet until they can implement Casper.

Only other solution is to ask miners to significantly raise their block gas limits when mining, but that will increase difficulty for miners, I wonder how much hashing power ETH has lost to ETC because of the difficulty timebomb.

Going forward, Ethereum needs to do something to sort out their network issues on ICOs or see further declines in market value for ETH with each large ICO. This will all be sorted out once Ethereum releases its Metropolis phase moving beyond Homestead expected in early Q4, October. We may see that pushed up to late Q3 with the ongoing network issues, but something needs to be done to address the network traffic jams until Casper can be implemented.

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