As the clock counted down to the final moments of the big Ethereum (ETH) Merge, co-founder Vitalik Buterin joined the “Ethereum Mainnet Merge Viewing Party” live stream presented by the Ethereum Foundation to share his his excitement and PoS vision with the community.
When asked if he was happy about the Merge, Buterin replied that he is “absolutely excited about being exited from the proof-of-work era.”
The co-founder went on to say that the historic transition of the network from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) has been on the plan for years.
“[It] has obviously been a dream for the Ethereum ecosystem since pretty much the beginning. We started the proof-of-stake research with that blog post on Slosher back in January 2014.”
The Merge can be seen as reinventing the laws of physics, conferring to Buterin. PoW works with the usage of real-world functionalities such as electricity, hardware and computers. Whereas with PoS, everything is virtualized, “basically letting us create a simulated universe that has its own laws of physics.”
Buterin said that among the prime motivations for the switch are the high costs and the massive amount of energy usage. The Merge is said to drastically reduce energy consumption by 99.95%.
He also claimed that not only will this be good for the environment, which has been a hot topic among environmentalists towards the crypto space, but also for “non-environmental externalities.” The example was given of the GPU price hike due to ETH mining.
Shortly after Vitalik’s mini spotlight in the Livestream, the Merge finally took place on Sept. 15 at 06:42:42 UTC at block 15537393. The merging of the Ethereum mainnet implementation layer and the Beacon Chain’s consensus layer took place at the Terminal Total Difficulty of 58750000000000000000000. Following the Merge, the network no longer relies on a PoW consensus mechanism.
Buterin praised the community and accompanied in the next era of Ethereum via a tweet.
These new optimizations permit developers and users to scale the network in ways not possible or that were unmanageable in the past. This is an important step in pushing the mass adoption of decentralized technologies and onboarding the next billion into the ecosystem.
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