Ethereum Merge in mid-September - what's your strategy?

salian

salian

Disciple
The Ethereum's loooong-awaited "Merge" is just around the corner. Ethereum developer Tim Beiko tweeted out the block that the Merge will take place at - 58750000000000000000000. This should hit somewhere around 15th - 16th September 2022.

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Ethereum’s upgrade to ETH 2.0 means that instead of being a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain, Ethereum will be proof-of-stake (PoS).

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This will eliminate the need for miners, who will now be replaced by validators on the main (PoS) chain.

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Miners however will be incentivized to help the (older) PoW chain take on a life of it's own and keep it running.

If that happens, as both chains will be identical at the time of the Merge, all assets will theoretically exist on both chains, for an instant.

There would then be a short period of high volatility as the market seeks to find the true value of each asset on the PoW chain. Most likely all the other tokens on ETHPoW (i.e. ETH on the old PoW chain) will be worthless after the Merge. Projects and stablecoins may cease to work on the old chain and drop to zero.

With this background in mind, what should be the strategy for individuals?
  • Some people plan to convert most of their assets to ETH, in the hope that the ETHPoW will ultimately retain some non-zero value.
  • Others are using stablecoin like USDC to borrow ETH on Aave and buy stETH.
  • Others say if everyone is planning to sell ETHPoW post-merge, who will buy it. So ignore ETHPoW, lend out ETH in DeFi, profit from high interest rates now.

What's your plan?
 
The final testnet merge (Goerli) happened on the 10th of August, slightly earlier than expected. At this point the only thing I see that could delay it would be a previously-undiscovered client bug.
 
Difficulty is increasing as per last 3 screenshots, so people are using every last breath before everything comes to an end? Is that so.... though it won't matter after 24h
 
”Difficulty” for Ethereum has been set to gradually but exponentially increase since August 2015. This is intentional.

(If you divide difficulty by network hashrate, you will get the average block find time. So as difficulty increases, miners need to add more power (or more miners need to join in) for the same reward.)

Difficulty is what is used as the "on-chain clock" here: the merge is set to happen not at any specific "time" as in DD:MM:YY HH:MM:SS, but when the current difficulty increases and reaches the target difficulty of 58750000000000000000000.

It does appear that ETHPoW (pre-merge i.e. proof-of-work Ethereum) will be supported as a separate currency including by exchanges like Binance, so mining will continue on that as a separate chain, for now. A "difficulty bomb" might be introduced into Ethereum sometime later to disincentivize such miners.
 
salian said:
It does appear that ETHPoW (pre-merge i.e. proof-of-work Ethereum) will be supported as a separate currency including by exchanges like Binance, so mining will continue on that as a separate chain, for now. A "difficulty bomb" might be introduced into Ethereum sometime later to disincentivize such miners.
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This got me really confused, I thought POS would be a miracle and ETH mining will stop after merge.
Will ETH mining difficulty increase exponentially after the merge or it will continue as it is now?
 
mzsa1994 said:
This got me really confused, I thought POS would be a miracle and ETH mining will stop after merge.
Will ETH mining difficulty increase exponentially after the merge or it will continue as it is now?
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ETH can't be mined after PoS. Difficulty bomb will be introduced just before the merge to disincentivize any miners on the mainnet.
The so-called fork would just be a fork of the main ETH chain just before the merge. With that said it will have nothing to do with the ETH currency as we know it. It'll be a separate currency and will people use it or not remains to be seen.

The current ETH mainnet is actually a fork of the original blockchain which is now known as Ethereum Classic (ETC) which was forked in 2016 to address a hack of 3.6 million ETH on the network. This would be the 2nd fork.
 
Hope you, my fellow gamers, get the deals y'all desire. Hoping that the greedy resellers, retailers, distributors and hoarders in India will finally see an end to what was probably one of the greatest runs for them.
 
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