> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to…
This is not a very good explanation, but basically, you can have a "currency" using just asymmetric key cryptography: users simply sign "transactions". The problem is that you need a central authority to confirm the order of transactions, otherwise the recipient of a "transaction" will not know if the funds associated with that transaction have already been spent to someone else ("double spending"). You can solve this using hashcash to make the transaction order hard to reverse- creating a "proof-of-work" by doing something that is easy to verify but hard to determine (like reversing a hash function). Another method is "proof-of-stake" wherein transaction order is not signed by a central authority but instead general users that are guided by some internal incentive structure.
Cryptocurrency is often expensive to run or use because a cryptocurrency transaction has to be synchronized across the entire network of that cryptocurrency, and there are incentive structures like fees to prevent people from spamming the network.
There is also tech like zero-knowlege-proofs, multisig, etc. that can do interesting stuff. But this is the basic concept.