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Saturday, September 17, 2022

What Does the Ethereum Merge Mean?

 Had exactly this question in mind when I read of the 'Ethereum merge'. Below an intro and much more at the link.

What The Merge Means,  by Ali Yahya  from https://a16zcrypto.com/ 

September 15, 2022

The Merge – the major Ethereum upgrade that happened early Thursday morning – will go down as one of the most important moments in the history of open source. It’s hard to think of a cooler example of a community of hundreds of developers across many organizations driving years of open-ended research and hard technical development.

Many people don’t realize: Transitioning Ethereum to “proof-of-stake” (PoS) – an alternative to “proof-of-work” (PoW) mining for reaching consensus on blocks of transactions – was an insane feat. The update involved hot-swapping the most important component of Ethereum’s architecture – its consensus mechanism – *while it was running*. All this occurred while maintaining perfect uptime for millions of users, thousands of decentralized applications (dapps), and hundreds of billions of dollars secured.

I believe Ethereum is a far superior blockchain now than it was before. Why? Let’s review some of the advantages.

Energy efficiency

Post-Merge, Ethereum is now 100x+ more energy-efficient than it was before. Participating in consensus no longer expends the enormous amount of electricity that PoW does. After The Merge, energy usage of ETH will be comparable to the datacenters of web2.  ... '   (more at the link) 

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