Can decentralised networks reform themselves?
Universal Coordinated Time on August 18th and all over the world people are dialling in to a fortnightly “core developers” Zoom call, which is broadcast live on YouTube to anyone who wants to watch. None of the participants have their cameras on. Most appear as just black squares with names—including one labelled Vitalik, behind which lurks Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum.
The idea for the Ethereum blockchain was first published in 2014 by Mr Buterin. As with Bitcoin, it is a large database of all the transactions that have ever taken place in the cryptocurrency. But Mr Buterin’s crucial insight was that the blockchain could do much more than that—it could also keep track of lines of code.
To implement a change like the merge requires sufficient consensus among the interested parties. All the major clients must agree to write the software, enough nodes must update their software and all the real-world applications layered on the blockchain—like stablecoins backed by dollars in bank accounts—must accept the new merged chain is the one that will maintain the status of their assets. It can be surreal to watch this happening in real time.
For a split this time, “there basically needs to be one single miner in the world who decides they want to continue with the proof of work,” meaning there almost certainly will be one, says Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation. The question is how many miners stick and how many twist. Chandler Guo, who supported the Ethereum Classic fork in 2016, is attempting to organise miners around a proof-of-work token called “”. “I fork Ethereum once, I will fork it again!” he has said.
The change also reduces the need for specialised mining hardware. Nvidia, a chipmaker, makes graphics cards for gaming that can also be used for mining ether. From May to July, in part fuelled by rumours of an impending merge, revenues from its chips fell by half compared with the previous three months. On eBay prices of second-hand graphic cards are tumbling.
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