Countdown to The Merge
Right now, if you Google The Merge, you’ll find a countdown to what may be a much more important event than many people think: the conversion of Ethereum, the platform that, among many other things, runs the second most important cryptocurrency in the world, from proof-of-work to proof-of-participation.
What’s so important about The Merge? To begin with, because these days, anything that reduces the energy consumption of a system by 99% is, in itself, important, particularly if we are talking about a system used regularly by millions of people and that generates significant emissions.
Will this promised reduction be real, due to the greater efficiency resulting from the change in the consensus system? Hard to say, because it depends mainly on the reaction of the miners, the companies and the people who, until now, processed Ethereum’s transactions. When the mechanism that until now consisted of executing complex calculations that demanded a lot of energy in a competition to solve cryptographic equations, becomes, simply, a lottery in which the network will be protected by users who “bet” certain sums of the…
