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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

I am sure staking pools will be available to people with less than 32 ETH

They already are. The Merge refers to the fact that the PoS chain has been running parallel to the main chain for one year now. It has been thoroughly tested live and so now will be merged back into the main chain like a branch of a git repo.

How can two chains be merged if one is a fork of the other without having instances of double spending? With source code in Git you can manually pick which version of each line you want in the merged result, but here it's not possible to do that if services or merch have been exchanged with coins. Except if you're fine with having to deal forever with coins and merged-from-the-fork coins on the eth blockchain?

As far as I understand it both forks have the same ledger, its only the transaction validation method thats changing. The PoS fork is mirroring all of the PoW transactions so no double spending or extra coins.

ETH 'on the beacon chain' today is locked in a contract.

Transactions and state are only on the PoW chain. The PoS chain only runs the staking protocol.

When the merge happens, the PoW software (the "execution client") will keep running transactions, but instead of choosing blocks by looking at miner hashes, it will look to the beacon chain to choose them. So stakers will run both the PoS client, and the execution client with the mining function turned off.

PoW software that does no work? More likely Ethereum is about to fork and big question will be does the market value of ETHpow really go to zero quickly.

I'm willing to bet it does. Well, probably never to 0, but close enough.

There's just too many escape valves. If you're a miner, you don't care about what network you're mining, you care about getting the most profit out of your hardware. There are several EVM PoW chains that are established, have been around and are listed and traded somewhere already, and have functioning contracts in them, and beyond that there are other non EVM PoW chains to direct your hardware at if you're running GPUs. It just doesn't make sense for a miner to take the risk of backing a new chain over moving their hash power over to an existing one.

It will be the "execution client." It will still run the transactions, it just won't pick the blocks.

At some point I'm sure they'll remove the legacy mining code, I just don't know whether they've done it yet.

>It has been thoroughly tested live ...

Yes, definitely, and I'm sure all malicious actors made sure to disclose their exploits before it goes live, right? :)

I have been using Stakewise.io that is 1) somewhat decentralised 2) gives liquididy for your stake and ability to sell it (instead of waiting for the exit / pause which is not yet supported by the protocol)

https://stakewise.io/

Note that the current Ethereum consensus protocol does not support 100% decentralised staking pools yet.

Some of the better known ones are Lido and RocketPool.

They are, and there seems to be a drive by legitimate actors to build them up. For example, Coinbase is building theirs by offering up to $50 ($10 every $100 worth) in exchange for initial staking of Eth.

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