Ethereum Merge: How one big cryptocurrency is going green

I’m very hopeful that they merge will go well (projected to happen in about 2 hours as of this comment). but anything can happen. This is probably one of the most high-stakes moments in open source history I think.

One interesting fact about ethereum’s new consensus protocol: what happens during a hypothetical WWIII, when half the world becomes completely unable to communicate with the other half?

Well, ethereum favors liveness over consistency, so both halves of the world will continue producing blocks. And they have a mechanism called “finalization”, where once 2/3rds of the stake has signed a block it cannot be reverted (your client will refuse to ever revert it).

But if the partition results in a 50/50 split, the chain won’t finalize. But each half of the world will see the validators not producing blocks, and penalize them by deleting some of their stake. After a time, each half will think the other half has been penalized enough that their half now has 2/3rds of the stake. At that point both halves will begin finalizing blocks again, thus permanently splitting the network into two separate chains.

Reducing power usage is a positive, but it isn't green until the system is actually useful for facilitating commerce at scale. Ethereum hasn't shown that capability, even as an auxiliary currency in international trade, and I am skeptical its fundamental architecture is capable of doing so.

I guess running the eth blockchain on amazon servers is greener and decentralized))

Now,

if only there were a pressing use case beyond grift and crime....

How much did this product placement cost, or is post-Brexit BBC the equivalent of Forbes.com?