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. ...
- Energy Efficiency
- Security
- Fairness and Decentralization
- Finality
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