The Ethereum ‘Merge’ has big implications for crypto mining and Bitcoin: What to know

euronews.com:

The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency is about to undergo a significant transformation that will change its technology to cut carbon emissions by more than 99 per cent, according to its platform Ethereum.

The transition known as “the Merge” is coming to Ethereum, which will upgrade its blockchain technology from the intensive energy-consuming model used by its rival Bitcoin.

While anticipation around the move has seen the price of Ethereum’s token, Ether (ETH), double in the last two months, not everyone is looking forward to the change.

Euronews Next looks at what is changing and how the transformation may affect the crypto market.

If all goes to plan, the first part of the Merge upgrade will occur on September 6 and the second part of the upgrade will happen between September 10 and September 20, the Ethereum Foundation said.

The switch will take Ethereum from the intensive energy-consuming proof-of-work (PoW) model to the proof-of-stake (PoS) model. Both mechanisms are used to confirm transactions and add new blocks to the chain, but they work differently.

The PoW system works like a competitive numeric guessing game and the first person to solve the puzzle is awarded a fixed amount of cryptocurrency. It requires a global network of computers to run at the same time when a transaction takes place and therefore a lot of energy.

In the PoS system, you do not need the energy-consuming hardware as you acquire coins, which are put up as collateral in the staking process and there is then a random selection through the software.

How powerful your machine is does not increase your chance of winning and being able to create the next block for the blockchain. The only thing that increases your chance of winning is just getting