The ice age is a drastic increase in difficulty that was planned at launch to force the developers to release a proof of stake algorithm. The idea was that no o

The ice age is a drastic increase in difficulty that was planned at launch to force the developers to release a proof of stake algorithm. The idea was that no one would want to actually switch to a proof of stake when the time came (miners would lose all their profit, and miners have a lot of power - see current bitcoin situation) To convince early adopters that there would actually be a switch to proof of stake the ice age was conceived. The ice age can be delayed however as we see here (this isn't the first time its been delayed either) Switching from proof of work to proof of stake will probably be hard to pull off without disruption.