PROOF OF STAKE (POS) VERSUS PROOF OF WORK (POW) MINING, ETHEREUM MERGER IMPLICATIONS

Greetings dear readers of the @Leofinance community, in previous installments we made a conceptual approach that did not allow us to understand the functionality of the proof of participation protocol (POS) and its predecessor the work protocol (POW), in this sense, through this publication We will do a review and analysis that allows us to understand what the actions of the ETHEREUM network would be when abandoning the proof-of-work protocol and adopting the participation process as the fundamental protocol of the network.

In this sense, the merger process, which the developers have called The Merge, is about to start and there are diverse points of view that are handled in the face of the adaptation of new mechanisms. of participation, so that we will focus on the issue of system security, since according to an expert in the area, the network would enter into certain vulnerabilities such as 51% attacks or voluntary forks that would cause imbalance in the execution of the merger .

Therefore, it is necessary for each user to keep in mind that the merger is not an immediate process, on the contrary it can take several months and during this type a duality can arise between the networks that are managed through the POW protocol and the new network associated with the POS protocol, therefore, it is normal to think that the mining process will not stop and the miners will continue working in the time that the update process takes.

So the normal scenario that can be seen from the perspective of the developers is to achieve a gradual shutdown of the mining process, since a drastic reduction could cause the network to fall into the attack of 51 %, where malicious people take over the network through the majority in the mining or computing power.

Based on the above, the ETH developers, including Tim Beiko, have decided to implement an emergency plan, which consists of giving little information about the launch of the merger process so that will be forcefully executed to avoid a hashrate crash.

Similarly, as a preventive mechanism, they will make a premeditated advance of the launch of The Merge, so that the current staking that is being executed is the one that validates the transactions instead of the hashrate that would come in decline.

The previous measures that come to the fore are aimed at preventing the generation of bifurcations between the networks generated before and after the merger, where the possibility would arise that some mining group would refuse to stop the ETHEREUM mining process, which would result in the old network functioning as an independent currency or project from the new and updated ETHEREUM, just like what happened with the well-known classic Ethereum.

Which would cause users to divide the assets in both networks, so the number of assets in the first network will be directly proportional to the second generated network. So we will continue to wait for the advantages that the ETH update would provide by updating the software generated through The Merge, which in theory would bring better benefits in terms of commission reduction in transactions carried out by users.