Mainnet Merge Announcement

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Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with the Bellatrix upgrade. After this, the proof-of-work chain will migrate to proof-of-stake upon hitting a specific Total Difficulty value.

The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain – 11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022.

The Terminal Total Difficulty value triggering The Merge is 58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022.

Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset. Operators will shut down on September 6, 2022.

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With such a tone I wouldn't expect an answer. Do your own research.

> Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake has been a loooong time coming. Thank you to everyone who contributed to researching, specifying, developing, analyzing, testing, breaking, fixing, or explaining everything that got us to The Merge.

At least now it has a hard deadline which will silence the parroting critics on 'burning up the planet', 'The merge will NEVER happen', 'repeated delays', etc.

But I imagine that they will invent new problems and the critics will hastefully rush in with their low effort hot takes. The crypto supporters also need to hold their horses a bit on their claims of this 'taking over the current system' which is extremely unlikely to happen.

Which ever side or view you are on in regards to crypto, The Merge seems to be undeniably a great spectacle of software architecture and this event has gone through a very regimented process and checks in upgrading components that handle billions of dollars worth of money.

I await to see what happens next.

Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized with some extra steps?

Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it works is because there's just a small number of validators, which is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends.

edit: putting this at the top because nobody is responding on topic. I am NOT talking about the class of people who stake 32 eth to validate nodes. I am talking about the class of people with the ability to declare that the people with stakes did not validate correctly and therefore lose their stakes. My understanding is that this is a very small number of people and is mostly just the ethereum foundation.

edit edit: The term for this class is apparently called slashers, not validators.