What will happen with “The Merges”?
The objective of this change -as stated by its programmers, Vitalik Buterinamong them- is to combine the main network of the Ethereum blockchain with another system to reduce the energy consumption that the current Proof of Work (PoW) model implies, in which thousands of computers in the world compete to solve complicated equations to unlock new digital tokens or validate transactions.
Ethereum vs Bitcoin
According to different estimates, the validation of Bitcoin operations (which also uses PoW) requires about 150 terawatt hours per year (TWh) to run the computers that validate operations, equivalent to 0.65% of the world’s energy supply, while that Ethereum demands about 75 TWh per year.
What changes does “The Merge” bring to Ethereum?
With “The Merge” Ethereum will change its model to Proof of Stake (PoS, in English) from which it will be the users of the ETH blockchain who verify the transactions using their existing assets.
As of this change, to be an ETH validator it will only be necessary to have 32 ETH to activate your own validator, which must be deposited and temporarily frozen in the network to be able to do so.
With this change, it is expected that the energy consumption that the network will use will be reduced by 99.95%, according to the information site created by the ethereum.org community.
“Once the Merge is complete, the carbon footprint of each operation on Ethereum is expected to be reduced to 0.05% of its current environmental impact. On the other hand, this upgrade could help further decentralization on Ethereum, through the democratization of access to be a network validator”, they explained from Ripio, one of the main exchanges in Argentina with more than 3.5 million users in Latin America and Europe.
To understand the real dimension of this change, Matías Caricato, CTO of Buenbit, gave the following example: “Imagine that the Ethereum network is a ship. Now, it has to change from a combustion engine to an electric one without stopping at any time. In other words, you have to make a hot change from one type of technology to another in a network with a value of 200,000 million dollars, millions of users and nothing can go wrong.
“I see this as one of the most important technological events in history. There are no precedents in history at the engineering or technological level of something like this. It can be assimilated with the arrival of man on the Moon,” Caricato assured in an online presentation, days ago.
Currently, the ETH PoW validation system has 8 thousand validators, while with ETH PoS it will have 400 thousand validators, so there will be 50 times more decentralization than the system has today.
“Once we become validators, the network starts randomly assigning us blocks to generate or to check. In exchange for this service we provide, it pays us in ether. If a validator performs any malicious action, they are penalized by slashing: destroying their ether”, explained Pablo Sabbatella, director of Defy Education, who assured that with this change Ethereum will be able to “implement techniques that allow it to be 10,000 times more scalable”
Even so, he assured that the cost of the operations (gas) that are paid in the Ethereum blockchan will not drop “immediately”, although this will be “the first step that paves the way for sharding, which will allow transaction costs to be lowered”. .
Source: Ambito
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