ETH's "Merge" Coming Sep 19th - The Good, The Bad, The UglySo if you've been paying attention to crypto stuff for a while, you probably heard that Ethereum's big "merge" is coming on Sep 19th. They've been talking about it for a while but there's now at least a definite date. (And they're pretty good at making deadlines once they commit to a date, to be fair.)
The switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake should be an improvement to most things for the most part, but there's a few things people should know:
- The coin is set to become a deflationary asset, out-scarcity-tizing (is that a word?) the coin it's trying to beat, Bitcoin. This should, in theory, be good for current ETH/ETH2 holders but even according to the team this is something that'll happen over time, not right away. (I think this argument is a strategic one, personally - more explanations later.)
- The merge won't solve ETH's scaling problems - the "sharding" improvements are planned to come later, the earliest mid-2023. The idea was for ETH to "burn" its existing supply in order to keep gas fees down but we don't know if this is going to work in practice.
- The merge will effectively put all ETH miners out of a job, and many of them will forced to move over into other chains since mining will no longer be profitable on ETH2 as the "difficulty bomb" sets in. If you've noticed ETC going up a lot recently, keep in mind that that project has already been hacked 3+ times at the protocol level and can't be considered legitimate. (The fact that it somehow stays alive is still bizarre to me tbh.)
I've been with ETH since 2014 so I've seen a lot of changes happen within the ecosystem over the years - but the community has definitely changed a lot since the NFT craze of last year - with more money comes more attention, and with that, more noise as well. Since there's not much happening on the chain these days most talks online has become more about beating Bitcoin rather than about product/technical achievements.
Mid-term, I think ETH will do well financially since that seems to be its primary focus right now. All those big names that got in earlier this year probably are gonna do whatever it takes to make that happen. It's the development and cultural sides long-term that has me concerned since I feel like the more the BTC and ETH folks argue with each other they more they start to sound alike.
I made a big leap from ETH to Tezos this year, after doing a lot of research on my end. Folks probably remember me shilling for Ethereum for a long time so the decision wasn't easy, but I felt it was necessary, at least for the things I'm interested in.
- Tezos has been proof-of-stake since the very beginning of its launch and it has had time to refine its processes. Technologically, the Tezos stacks is far superior right now and ETH is going to have trouble keeping up, imo.)
- The high gas fees basically made a lot of apps built on top of ETH useless and many devs/artists have already fled the scene. I'm skeptical if they're going to come back, even if they manage to fix the issues on the back end. Loss of trust doesn't come back easy. XTZ saw a big leap in chain activity last month while most other chains were still on the decline.
- I think that the decision to not give ETH2 stakers a definite date of when they can withdraw their funds (probably the most annoying thing about the project right now especially since you literally can't do anything with ETH2 tokens atm) is probably unhealthy. This holding pattern allows for the project to manipulate economic outcomes artificially (acting as a quasi-government) at the cost of market legibility - which could make the asset more unpredictable long-term.
- ETH still doesn't have on-chain governance and as far as I'm aware, has no plans to. You're basically trusting that the projects on top of it are doing things in good faith. Tezos, on the other hand, has voting and governance mechanisms baked in. (This is probably the biggest divergence between the two projects right now, imo.)
- With Tezos I can get reliable staking rewards without having to have it locked up for an indefinite period of time, which seems like a much more reasonable deal to me, honestly. And I can actually use the coins for buying things
I got caught up in things too, trust me - but as the world heads into a global recession (possibly a depression), everyone's probably going to have to tighten up what and where their money is going. The most obvious thing right now is interest rates - which proof-of-stake coins are well-positioned to take advantage of since the banks are still dragging their feet in regards to what it's offering to people in savings.
Bitcoin is probably screwed, ETH is a (?), Tezos and other high-quality chains will probably do well. That's my hunch, anyway. I don't expect everyone to agree, but this is what my gut is telling me right now.
