Sep 21, 2022
Overview of the Merge
by Iurii Shyshatskyi, Chief Scientist at Jax.Network
Ethereum’s upgrade called “Merge” was a major newsmaker of the previous week. The activity of the Ethereum team has an effect on the cryptocurrency space. So we have decided to leave a comment on our blog about recent developments.
Although protocol updates are rather common in the altcoin space, Merge has attracted a lot of attention due to many reasons. It affects the money of numerous users of the second cryptocurrency by the market cap. Furthermore, it affects miners, who invested in mining ether. After the upgrade, they will have to switch their mining rigs to another network or Ethereum fork.
The Merge upgrade involves the transition of Ethereum from PoW consensus to PoS consensus. This modification of the very core of the protocol has been announced by Ethereum founders a long time ago. The Ethereum team has spent a lot of time and effort promoting their upgrade.
Since the very beginning of the project, Ethereum founders claim that PoS consensus has various advantages compared to PoW. They often speculate about the benefits which they aim to achieve from the Merge and anticipated subsequent upgrades. In particular, they believe that PoS sharding can improve Ethereum scalability, reduce transaction fees, stimulate adoption and push the price of Ether to the moon.
However, the PoS agenda of the Ethereum team is widely criticized. It fuels the debate about what is better: PoW or PoS. The Jax.Network team is a consistent opponent of Ethereum’s PoS agenda. We believe that the Merge is a major step toward the centralization of Ethereum. Moreover, we often cast doubt that the transition to PoS could bring the benefits described by Ethereum founders.
In our previous blog posts, we have discussed typical problems of PoS solutions such as long-range attacks and centralization. Furthermore, in another set of posts, we have shown that the asserted benefits of PoS sharding are exaggerated while they have many drawbacks. We plan to continue this work and expose other flaws of the Ethereum 2.0 proposal in our blog.
For many years Ethereum’s transition to PoS was a subject of debates and speculations. However, after the Merge has been completed, the crypto-community is able to assess the validity of certain claims and hypotheses on a real-world example. We believe that Ethereum 2.0 will expose all drawbacks of the PoS and refute many assertions made by its proponents.
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