Ethereum completes the “Merge,” which ends mining and cuts energy use by 99.95%

The "Merge" upgrade eliminates mining and dramatically reduces the energy consumption of the world's second-biggest coin. Today's action completed the transition to proof-of-stake consensus, officially deprecating proof-of-work, and reduced energy consumption by 99.95 percent, according to the Ethereum Merge.org page.

The plan for today's change has been in the works for a long time. Over the past year, the date of the Merge has been pushed back to give developers more time to prepare.

It was expected that the switch would happen. At 6: 43 a.m., the Merge officially kicked in. More than 41,000 people were tuning in to watch a viewing party for the ethereum mainnet. As key metrics trickled in suggesting that the core systems had remained intact, they watched withbated breath. The Merge was officially finalized about 15 minutes after it began.

The carbon footprint of Hong Kong is similar to that of the country ofChile, according to a report.

As of this writing, the ether price was almost 9 percent lower than it was at this time last year.

No more mining

The official website says that the Merge was the joining of the original execution layer of the Mainnet with its new proof-of-stake consensus layer. It eliminated the need for energy intensive mining and allowed the network to be secured.

The Mainnet and the Beacon Chain are running in parallel. It was ready to take over after many tests.

The mainnet transactions were not initially processed by the beacon chain. It was reaching consensus on its own state by agreeing on active validators. The time had come for the chain to reach consensus on real world data. The consensus engine for all network data was the beacon chain.

Mining is no longer the means of producing valid blocks now that the change has been completed. The proof-of-stake validators are now in charge of processing the validity of all transactions. No history was lost in the process of the joining of Mainnet and theBeacon Chain.

People who hold ether should be able to handle the change. No user action will be taken with funds. The project said that people telling you otherwise are likely to be scam artists.

Less ether will be issued

The issuance of ether will change as a result of the merger.

Validators on the Beacon Chain are rewarded with ETH for attesting to the state of the chain and proposing blocks. Rewards (or penalties) are calculated and distributed at each epoch (every 6.4 minutes) based on validator performance. The validator rewards are significantly less than the miner rewards issued on proof-of-work (2 ETH every ~13.5 seconds), as operating a validating node is not an economically intense activity and thus does not require or warrant as high a reward.

By contrast, mining requires high levels of issuance to sustain. There were rewards for mining and staking before the merge.

To participate, "validators explicitly stake capital in the form of ether into a smart contract on ether." If the validator behaves dishonestly or carelessly, this staked ETH can be destroyed.

A validator needs to deposit 32 ETH into the deposit contract to run software.

The proof-of-stake page states that the timing of blocks is determined by the mining difficulty. The time in proof-of-stake is divided into two parts. There is a random selection of validators to be a block proposer. The validator creates a new block and sends it to other networks. The validity of the block is determined by the votes of the committee of validators.