There are many opinions on the “Ethereum merger”

On May 20, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said at the ETH Shanghai conference that Ethereum 2.0 is currently undergoing final network testing. If all problems are resolved, the merger may take place as early as August. If other conditions arise, it may also happen in September or October.

Nothing Research partner @0xTodd said that first of all, we can see that Vitalik deliberately downplayed the concept of "ETH 2.0" and emphasized specific technologies such as PoS and danksharding. Not only Vitalik, but also the entire Ethereum community is deliberately avoiding the term "ETH 2.0" to prevent misunderstandings. To put it bluntly, the "merge" of PoS ETH and PoW ETH is a simple switch of consensus mechanisms, more like a transfer of power, and there is no substantial change at the user level.

After the "big merger", all PoW mining nodes were offline and replaced with PoS nodes, such as Lido, various CEXs, etc. To be honest, the difficulty bomb is here, and GPU miners have to go offline, unless there is a fork. However, the current voice and time window of ETH PoW miners are not enough to support such a fork.

0xTodd also said that some of Vitalik’s views are ahead of their time, such as ETH is too dependent on DeFi. DeFi is OK in a bull market, but there may be many unexpected dangers in a bear market.

Yuga Cohler, senior software engineer at Coinbase, analyzed that the most notable aspect of Merge may be the efficiency it produces: Ethereum's transition to PoS is expected to reduce energy consumption by 99.95% compared to PoW. At a time when global energy costs are soaring, this evolution will be a welcome development. Of course, there are also legitimate reasons to oppose PoS - for example, some PoS designs can promote the concentration of wealth, and there is a lack of comparable large-scale testing. Nevertheless, given the existence of peer-to-peer blockchain networks that continue to run on PoW (i.e. Bitcoin), the merger makes sense as a strategic next step for Ethereum and should gain the goodwill of environmental awareness.

Yuga Cohler said that the essential achievement of the merger is more human than energy efficiency . The merger has proven to be an extremely complex task with many challenges. However, its completion will be achieved not through the dictates of a central authority, but through the organic coordination of like-minded individuals. Fundamentally, a successful merger will prove the viability of decentralization as a social organizing principle.

Tim Beiko, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, said: The merger will affect the average block time of Ethereum. Currently under proof of work, a block appears on average every about 13 seconds, and there is a considerable difference in actual block times. Under proof of stake, blocks appear exactly every 12 seconds , unless a slot is missed because the validator is offline or because they did not submit a block in time. In practice, this currently happens in <1% of the slots. This means that the average block time on the network has been reduced by about 1 second. Smart contracts that assume a specific average block time in their calculations need to take this into account.

Tim Beiko argues that under proof of work, there is always the possibility of a blockchain reorganization. Applications will typically wait for a few blocks to be mined at the new head before considering it unlikely to be removed or "confirmed" from the canonical chain. After The Merge, we have the concept of final and secure head blocks. The use of these blocks is more reliable than the "confirmation" proof of work blocks, but requires a shift in understanding to use them correctly.

WeekInEthNews founder Evan Van Ness ( @evan_van_ness) said, "Can someone point some GPUs to Ropsten so we can merge earlier? Every day that Ethereum stays on PoW is a disaster." He pointed out that the only real litmus test for being part of Ethereum is whether you want to get rid of PoW, and we have been talking about getting rid of it since 2013.

Twitter user @AutismCapital said that if there is price movement, it will be before the merger. Also, a reminder that the merger will not solve transaction fees.

Angel investor sassal.eth said that after the merger, the Ethereum network will completely switch to PoS - reduce energy usage by 99.98% - reduce ETH issuance by 80-90% - increase staked ETH APY - ETH becomes net deflation - and there will be no new ETH after at least 6 months.