Ethereum: The big challenge

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‍The origin

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Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, said in an interview in 2018: “I definitely, personally, hope that centralized exchanges burn in hell as much as possible”. That is one of the most descriptive fundamental reasons that motivated Vitalik to create the second major asset in the crypto market.

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He wrote in his “cyberhunter” profile the following description:

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“I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit.”

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Concept

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In his 19, the Russian-Canadian developer saw in Bitcoin the potential to create decentralized applications and apply them to anything, not just as a payment method.

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Ethereum is a public decentralized programme platform where anyone can write smart contracts using a code language named “Solidity”, which is similar to JavaScript. All this is mounted over a blockchain which makes it decentralized, the main goal of Vitalik. The second one is scalability, it is to say, having the structure and being enough robust to withstand multiple projects without losing efficiency

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What is EVM

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The “Ethereum virtual machine” plays a fundamental part of the Ethereum blockchain. It is responsible for executing a wide variety of instructions beside smart contracts. In a few words, it is the analog to a real computer.

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Ethereum 2.0

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“The merge, surge, verge, purge and a splurge”. It sounds like a poem, but are the phases in which Ethereum is, at the time I am writing this article, changing from a consensys of proof of work to a proof of stake. This is called “the merge”. For almost two years the developers had been working in a parallel blockchain called the “Beacon chain” where in orden to test improvements without affecting the principal network. This day finally arrived, it was on September 15. And it was successful.

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So, what is left of Ethereum 2.0 if the merge is done? Well, that is the surge, the verge and a splurge. The surge and the verge consist in adding sharding to the network. A scaling solution where nodes are given some kind of hierarchy in order to accelerate the speed of transactions.

The purge, alluding to the 2013 horror film, is about deleting the old network history. And finally the splurge, with a set of little updates to finish the hole process.

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¿Is the Merge going to reduce the cost of the gas fee of the network?

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The quick answer is no. Actually, the time the merge is expected to reduce for generating a block is from about 14 to 12 seconds. However, in the long run ,when the whole transition is done, including sharding and splurge, is expected to happen. The high costs are closely related to the number of transactions for time the network is able to process. It means scalability. As the merge is about to solve this problem, a good result would be the reduction of those costs.

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Why do companies still prefer Ethereum despite the high cost of gas fee?

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Security. It has demonstrated to be the better paid feature of the blockchain trilemma (decentralization, security and scalability). Afterall, if a blockchain is violated or fails, it automatically loses confidence from the community, making it extremely hard to recover. We have the recent case of Terra Luna as an example with countless attempts to rebuild the project with no results. 

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¿Where are Ethereum miners migrating?

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1. According to Altcoin Mining Pool for GPU and ASIC - 2Miners Ergo hash rate went from 32,94 TH/s on september 14 to 136,31 TH/s on the next day.
2. Another network that had a big rise in hash rate was Ethereum Classic, with 218% in just one day. 
3. Neoxa from 2,11 TH/s to 3,99 TH/s (89%)
4. The last one is Ravencoin, which incremented in a 57%

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