How The Merge will slash Ethereum’s climate pollution

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The stakes are huge for the planet as a result of the setting of The Merge. One of the most anticipated events in the history of criptocurrency will be the switch from a method of validating transactions to a new strategy that uses a small amount of electricity.

The transition is supposed to slash the amount of energy used by the company. Last week, the network was estimated to use as much electricity as the country of Bangladesh every year. Climate change is made worse by a lot of carbon dioxide pollution. The world's second- largest coin by market cap is the native token of the software company.

How much pollution was pumped out by the company before it disappeared? We can break it down as we please.

What is the name of the project?

The change in how transactions are recorded is the main reason. A block is a record of transactions that is maintained communally rather than by a single institution. Blocks of transaction records are added to the chain by many different people.

With so many players involved, a security system needs to be put in place to make sure no one messes with the ledger. The network is going to switch to a new one because the old one is energy intensive.

What was the reason for the pollution in the first place.

Energy inefficiency was built into the network from the beginning thanks to an old security system that was used to prove work. Proof of work can be used by miners to solve computational puzzles. It's supposed to prevent double-spending and miners will get new token in return. The puzzle solving gets harder as time goes on, requiring more energy to solve.

The cost of solving those puzzles is meant to make it harder for one entity to gain too much influence over the ledger. It would be against the purpose of the financial system to have that happen. It also comes with the risk of a bully manipulating the ledger for their own benefit.

With proof of work, miners can make more money by using more powerful computers. Data farms filled with hardware run around the clock to solve puzzles. Electricity bills for nearby communities are usually driven up by miners when they move to a new place. They leave behind e- waste when they solve those puzzles.

Problems associated with proof of work are associated with the other majorcryptocurrencies. Fossil fuel power plants that were dying away as a result of the search for abundant, affordable energy to power their operations have been resuscitated. Plants cause more pollution to be released into the air.

Policymakers are trying to figure out how to deal with the consequences of proof of work. After China cracked down on it in 2021, state legislators in New York passed a moratorium on proof of work mining for cryptocurrencies. In the US, Democratic lawmakers have inquired about the energy use of the companies that they work for.

There is a campaign called Change the Code, Not the Climate led by the nonprofits Greenpeace USA and Environmental Working Group.

Is The Merge going to help the environment?

The Merge is expected to reduce the environmental footprint of the company. A new process called proof of stake is being transitioned from proof of work to it. The method eliminates the need for powerful hardware and large amounts of electricity in order to keep the system running.

Instead of using huge energy costs as a deterrent to bad behavior, proof of stake requires validators to lock up digital currency as security. The validators have a stake in the ledger's accuracy. If someone adds faulty blocks to the chain, the guilty party loses their token. You need to stake 32 ETH in order to start as a validator. Bad actors risk losing a lot of money with each token.

Validators will be rewarded for doing the right thing. They are entered into a lottery to verify transactions and receive a reward. The next block in the chain is created by a random selection of validators. More computing power is not enough to increase the odds of being the one to add the block.

A successful transition to proof of stake is expected to cut energy use by at least 99 percent. There is a small amount of wiggle room because the computers still need to store data and verify transactions after TheMerge. Validators want to keep computers running, but they won't be using as much juice to solve the puzzles.

We are talking about a lot of energy savings. It is equivalent to 25% of the world's data centers use annually, according to Alex de Vries.

What is going to happen to this thing?

The newest version of the software that runs on the computers needs to be updated. It is more difficult to do when you have hundreds of thousands of people in the network. We will return to that later.

To get to this point, researchers developed a newBeacon Chain that uses proof of stake that is parallel to the main proof of workBlockchain. The old chain should be merged with the new one. The first phase of the Merge just started after years of delay. The upgrade went live today, which will allow the chain to be ready for the final transition in the near future. The Paris upgrade should end in the second phase.

Something could go wrong.

Too many miners will decide to stick with proof of work, which is worrying. Many of them will be hard-pressed to let go of their hardware since they have already invested in setting up their farms. There are a few different ways this could go.

If enough of them decide to ignore the software update, then the old proof of work could continue. Some miners are pushing for this to happen. The pollution that will be produced by that will persist. The amount of pollution depends on how many miners revolt and how much they value the zombie chain. Since they have to be able to pay off their electricity bills and still make money, they will only be able to sustain as much mining as the token allows.

Or, the miners could look for a more established proof-of-workBlockchain. The Ethereum network split in two in response to a hack in 2016 that created two different speaches of the network. It looks like some miners are sticking to their ways and moving over to Classic.

If there aren't enough validators involved in the new proof of stake, there will be security risks for ether. It's easy to attack the network if you have very few validators. Leonardo Bautista Gomez is the founder of the Miga Labs and he wants to make sure that the participation rate is close to 99 percent.

Even though it may be technically difficult to implement, Bautista Gomez believes that we are conscious of our environmental responsibilities.

De Vries is a data scientist for De Nederlandsche Bank and he says that even if The Merge goes smoothly, it's still inefficient. Data is replicated across many devices and uses more energy as a result. De Vries acknowledges that proof of stake is more efficient than proof of work.

By the end of the month, the Merge is expected to be completed. We will see how successful the transition was.