Ethereum "merger" postponed: when the second cryptocurrency evolves

The fundamental update of the Ethereum blockchain has once again been postponed. Now the community of the second most capitalized cryptocurrency will be able to give up mining only in the second half of 2022.

This was announced by one of the developers of Ethereum Foundation Tim Beiko in his Twitter. According to him, while the changes were previously supposed to take effect in June, now it will happen at least two months later.

"It's not going to happen in June, it's probably going to happen a few months. There's no exact date yet, but we're definitely in the last chapter of PoW Ethereum," Beiko said, urging the ethereum community not to buy any more mining hardware.

The challenges of "Merge."

We are talking about Ethereum's transition from the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), which means abandoning cryptocurrency mining in favor of stacking. Thus, the process of "production" of new ETH coins will become less energy-consuming.

This event is called The Merge, as the main Ethereum network will join the PoS chain Beacon Chain. The new blockchain is called Ethereum 2.0.

As part of the multi-step transition, Ethereum developers implemented a "shadow fork" of the core network for the first time - a test procedure before launching the update to look for possible technical bugs and software holes. According to BlockScout, 10.5 million transactions were processed at an average rate of 12.6 seconds per block.

"Complexity Bomb."

An important aspect of the move to PoS is the "complexity bomb." This is an automatic increase in the generation time per block from 13 to 20 seconds, which will reduce the profitability of miners by about 50%.

"The "complexity bomb" predates Ethereum's "move. Its activation has been repeatedly postponed (Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin first talked about PoW abandonment in 2015), and the new date, according to Tim Beiko, is set for May 2022.

"Unlike previous Ethereum updates, Merge is not activated by blockchain time. Instead, the activation will happen because of the complexity score on the network," Beiko added, noting that this is harder to predict.

Mining is one of the most controversial components of cryptocurrency. In the context of the climate crisis, the European Union almost even banned the use of cryptocurrencies, which are obtained by PoW.

Good luck to you readers read.cash🖐

15.04.2022.

@Belozoriana