The Merge is here and Ethereum is now fully PoS - The Daily Gwei Refuel #448 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily way refuel where he kept the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony 15th of September 2022. alright everyone let's get into this special episode of the refuel which is basically going to be completely focused on the merge because the merge has happened it is no longer coming it is no longer in the future it is here and it went through so smoothly uh it was actually amazing so a lot of you would have watched the live stream that I was on with a ton of people on there that was hosted by myself eatstaker bankless uh and uh the ethereum cat herders it was a really well run stream I thought uh the coordination was great and then we all got to watch the merge happen live now the merge for those of you watching and

those of you have seen happens so smoothly that it actually I think surprised some of the core devs and researchers with how smooth it went and you guys know I've been talking about things to look for with when we do mergers we've done lots of test Nets and Shadow forks and stuff like that well the the top two things we want to look for is participation rate across the network which I believe dropped by only two percent or something like that maybe two or three percent so really not a drop a big drop at all basically negligible and we also finalized in the first Epoch and and with like a very high participation of I think 97 98 uh which is just crazy so the merge went through as good as it could have gone I think there was some configuration

issues or some little issues with some clients um I think one or two clients had some issues that they were easily resolved but the network as a whole emerged extremely successfully uh the blocks kept getting proposed people got their transactions in and the hilarious thing is that like all the culmination of the countless hours and years worth of work to get to this point really at the end of the day the merge just happened like it was a smooth transition users didn't feel anything different uh and they weren't impacted by anything there was no outages nothing like that and the chain has continued kicking on since so I mean a monumental to an historic day for every single person in the ethereum community I think you know I'm going to remember this day for the rest of my

life honestly it is one of the happiest in my life I waited five and a half years for this since I first got into ethereum because proof of stake has been at pretty much the top of my list of what I've been most excited about in ethereum and now the network is is just on purpose sake forever which is incredible I I can't believe I'm saying that right like it's actually it actually happened like there's no more it's coming it's here now so obviously a very exciting day for the Accord evidence and researchers as well all the people that worked on it the hundreds of people that work directly on getting this to mainnet they are going to take a well-deserved break I believe over the next four to five weeks uh in between Berlin uh conferences and events and uh Bogota in in Colombia they're going to

be enjoying the festivities there and I'm sure they're going to be throwing a ton of parties and just kind of enjoying this Monumental achievement that they were able to produce so if you want to check out uh I guess some more stuff around what happened around the um the beacon chain uh well I guess like around the merge you can go to the beacon chain website which I've talked about a lot before they've got this nice visualization up here but you can see that participation rates are still like not at what they were pre-merged so pre-merge was about 99.5 currently it's at 98.3 so really a negligible drop off it really doesn't matter at all uh but I expect that to see that go back up to 99 plus percent easily up to 99.5 once all of those are offline validators get

themselves worked out which shouldn't take very long and my validators I actually checked on them after the stream uh I was like okay they're safe they made it through the merge because they're in another room so I went and checked I'm like oh that's nice they all worked perfectly it actually didn't require anything else uh for me to do I had already gotten them all merge ready a little while ago so that was that was nice to see but yeah you can go visit the beacon chain website for an Explorer here um and explore explore around there's also an update here from etherscan so now that on etherscan mainnet blocks have now updated with proof of stake details so they've got finalization status proposed slot and Epoch fee recipient and consensus information tab as well so great to see etherscan being on the ball as usual with this with

these sorts of things and you can go check out that on etherscan itself you can check out the screenshots but also go to etherscan and you can see those new features there and speaking of that live stream you can I guess go back and watch it now on YouTube we actually had an insane amount of viewers I think it peaked at over 40 000 viewers uh at one point and it's got over 200 000 views on the video itself which is just crazy I believe it's the most viewed live stream in ethereum history vitalik's tweet about the merge is I think the most liked and retweeted tweet in ethereum's history I don't know if I've got it rpr I've got a couple of these other tweets but not the one where we spoke about the merge itself so obviously the world was watching there were a lot of eyes on the

merge and I think that over the next few weeks and months we're going to get people digesting it there's going to be tons of reporters uh talking about it especially that in energy reduction which is definitely the thing that's most interesting to people outside of crypto that's all going to play out as time goes on and it's funny because I'm seeing some comments on Twitter being like Oh my God Ethan immediately pump after the merge it's a scam it's it was all priced in it's like like why would you expect it to immediately go up in price like the market stuff is is mostly irrelevant but I think people often get the wrong idea about these sorts of things like we have removed that cell pressure right we have removed that execution risk the merge is done but it doesn't mean that immediately as soon as

the merge happened Heath was just gonna gig a pump especially in a wider bear market like this is not a bull market this is not 2021 this is 2022 which has been so far been a bear Market the entire year so I'm actually really happy about that I'm actually happy that the prices just gone sideways uh because at the end of the day like it's better to not have extreme volatility around these events because they're not sustainable if it's just extreme volatility to the upside because of some hyped up event it's generally not sustainable all and more people get burnt that way and it just becomes you know really annoying so I'm very glad that we merged in a bear Market I'm very glad that the market isn't reacting in a stupid way to this sorts of stuff and we'll see over the next few months if our thesis around the

uh that massive issue introduction playing out would be correct and I mean Hal presser said the same thing he said that it's not going to play out instantly it's going to take weeks and months for it to play out uh so you know wait a few months and then tell us that we were wrong or say that haha the ethereans don't know what they're talking about it didn't actually mean anything because I really do think that that's not true I think that it's definitely going to mean a lot but it's going to take a little bit to play out but that's all I'm going to say about them the market side of things as I said definitely go re-watch the live stream if you haven't yet for a fun stream we had uh people talking about all things uh proof of stake on on the stream as

well and we got to watch it live so you can go do that there and there was actually a quote on the stream from Justin Drake which blew my mind where he said the merge will reduce worldwide electricity consumption by 0.2 percent so that's how much that was estimated that the ethereum proven work chain was using now you guys know that the the energy reduction with proof of stake is obviously one of the biggest things that ethereans have uh have promoted over the years and it's one of the main reasons of moving to a proof of a stake I personally am just neutral in this regard but I still think this is a crazy number it really is crazy that these networks can use so much electricity and I think the debate is less around the electricity use and more about the efficiency of that use like do you think

that it's worth uh ethereum or Bitcoin using this much electricity for the value that they're providing the world as it exists today I don't think so I don't think ethereum provides enough value to justify that I don't think Bitcoin provides enough value to justify that usage and the thing with proof of work is that it scales up right so if the bigger these networks got the bigger proof of work Network gets the more electricity that it consumes so it's not really a linear relationship right uh and in terms of the value that it creates so yeah I mean for me proof of stake has always been a better bang for fuel box system in terms of security in terms of the value that obviously ethereum brings to the world and now it doesn't have to worry about this at all we literally do not have to worry about

people uh calling ethereum wasteful because of the fact that we are not literally wasteful because we're on proof of stake we don't waste energy like people work does or we don't use as much energy as proof of work does but again as I said I'm rather neutral on this it's fine that Bitcoin is on proof of work and continues that way it will remains to be seen how sustainable that is long term I obviously have my thoughts around this especially around their security budget and their long-term security prospects uh and I have also have my thoughts around the uh I guess the non-exist not non-existent but like the much worse Bank field buck that you get under proof of work uh but I'm not going to rehash that here I just think that that was a insane start that Justin Drake brought up uh vitalik also

pointed out that one important corollary corollary of this um this being a blocks being smoother obviously in a post-emerge world because they're deterministic at 12 seconds instead of probabilistic at around 13 seconds is better erp1559 performance because fewer blocks bump up against the two times limit so far the percentage of full blocks has dropped from 20 to 10 so you can actually see this in Martin koppelman's chart here that he posted it to Twitter uh and the little Spike that you see after the straight line is just a Mr Block so obviously there's going to be some missed blocks uh in previous stake ethereum it doesn't really matter because it doesn't mean that your transactions aren't going to get included you just have to wait for the next block for them to be included if if you're if you're missed there another validator will pick it up but

essentially it's always smooth because it is deterministic uh at 12 seconds there is no probabilistic uh um uh nature of it where it is with people of work where blocks can take longer than 13 seconds or be shorter than 13 seconds it is always going to be 12 seconds from now on which is very very cool and actually called slots in ethereum because they are blocks but there is more going on inside the block than just what was you know going on in proof of work uh there's obviously that attestations and things like that as well uh but I guess that's orthogonal 2 to this it's self so cool to see another big benefit of erp1559 as vitalik pointed out uh that that's just the gift that keeps on giving I think with 1559 and it's funny because uh I think is it

one of my tweets here uh yeah So speaking of erp1559 on the ultrasound.money website now you can actually see a metric called Supply change since merge and I uh you can see here that the supply chain because we were over 15 way which is the current ultrasound barrier uh we actually got to -139 points I guess three eighth at the time of recording now you can see here that chart I showed the other day we're not above the ultrasound barrier right now so we're not deflationary right now uh but it's more of an average over time so we'll see how that plays out obviously over the months and in years because you can literally so the funny thing about this is that for three months of the year you can be below the ultrasound barrier but then you only

need to be above it for three months of the year at 15 you only need to be at 15 way for three months of the year to make up for that but also like during times of higher volatility we can have persistent 50 100 way gas prices which will make up for it on average if you average it out over a year it makes up for the less deflationary periods or deflationary periods because averaged out it's uh it's it's obviously really um really beneficial so I think that looking at you know the day-to-day all the week to week uh deflationary properties of ether don't really make any sense doesn't really make any sense obviously it makes sense to look at month to month and and definitely year to year to see how it plays out because if you see if you saw it here by like

the last 30 days right and then you simulate merge uh you can actually uh where is it I think it's up the top here you can actually see that uh if you simulate merge here over the last 30 days uh I think Supply growth was about 0.1 percent right so it was basically almost neutral and then you go all it was minus 1.5 because that's accounting for everything since 1559 was implemented so still net deflationary from from that point which I think is very cool so yeah cool to see that there I think they're going to get rid of the simulate merge button soon uh because obviously we don't need that anymore because we're on purpose stake we're never going back to proof of work so I'm excited to see that be I guess I just tested there but you could see this little metric that they've uh that

they've installed here um so xiaoi Xiao Wei Wang from the ethereum foundation has put together a thread this was before the merge I went live about how we got to the merge basically uh and this is a recap thread on all the E3 search posts starting all the way back in October of 2019 where vitalik published the eth1 to eth2 transition on eth Research which introduced how to reuse the Ethan voting mechanism to feed the eth2 81 State Route into E2 uh so basically this was early the early I mean what became known as the merge this is what like really early on in in the process but then it evolved over time and you can read this whole thread I'm not going to rehash it here but you can read this whole thread

and how it evolved over time and how we came to what is what became the the merge uh which was basically I think uh in November 2020 yeah November 2020 I think was when uh the eighth one to E2 merger came much more into view and then since then there was a couple more things on the research side but really it was the specs the testing the drop ability the releases the test Nets the shadow Fox and all the rest of it to get to where we were today so you can go give shellways thread a read I thought it was very very interesting just to take down a trip down memory lane because obviously I had been a part of that and been monitoring it but I'd forgotten some of these things so maybe if you haven't been around since 2019 you'd want to learn the history here so

this is a great thread to check out and speaking of the history uh Ryan uh Ryan Sean Adams from banklicia replied to Raul Jordan's tweet about uh basically meeting his co-founder uh Preston Van Loon here four years ago to develop proof of stake ethereum develop the prism client her previous stake ethereum so Ryan said I remember I thought quote unquote eth2 would never ship then Prismatic lab stepped up and said we're doing this no funding guarantees you guys just started building it was such a confidence boost to the eth community during a difficult time sincerely thank you wouldn't be here without you now as I said before if you weren't around in those days of like 2019 especially you probably don't realize just how dark it was in terms of

aimless kind of you know we're going to move to proof of State we're going to move to we're going to do this E2 thing but there really wasn't a solid plan and that plan really did come come together uh pretty early on I think even in 2018 it started coming together through 2019 and then 2020 it really really ramped up especially obviously as we launched the beacon chain on December 1st 2020. so that all kind of came together but during those dark days these people basically volunteered their time there was no guarantee of funding there was no guarantee that this thing would succeed that it would ever get to mainnet there was just as Ryan said building like these people came and built something that they have uh believed would work that they believed is greater than themselves and they wanted to be part of

a movement and I remember back in 2019 funding was so dire that metallic himself uh basically YOLO air dropped a thousand each to these various uh groups and not just prylabs but I believe pretty much all the consensus layer client our teams at the time got about a thousand eight which I believe that was happening when Heath was about 100 bucks it was it was 100 Grand right and this is how tight funding was uh so he did that and he gave him the money to them and that obviously helped a lot and then obviously the East price went up so that was worth more for them and they did other things like I know some of them like Sigma Prime for example who developed the lighthouse client they also do audits security Audits and things like that so they branched out and it seems they've got like a lot of

funding now the ethereum foundation obviously helps them a lot too but that's not an issue anymore but as I said it wasn't just the funding side of things it really was the fact that there was no guarantee of success here this was literally like building something that uh was was brand new I mean just there was the vague notion of eth2 the vague notion of proof of stake like obviously there were specs that vitalik had done but there was no guarantee that it would work there was no guarantee that anyone would care and imagine how these guys feel like not just these two guys from prayer Labs but like all of the people that work directly on the development engineering and research side imagine how they feel with the merge going for like me myself like obviously I'm ecstatic about it I'm really happy about it but I'm not a Dev

I'm not a researcher I'm just an educator and a kind of I guess like a quote-unquote influencer right uh I'm no I'm not on the level of these rock stars so I can only imagine how they felt uh seeing this go through in the year's worth of tireless work that they've put into it just really warms my heart and I think the result of this isn't just the fact that there's that execution risk kind of like going to zero of the merge because obviously it's done now but it's also such a boon to The Wider Community because what it does is it shows that we can ship really complex and hard upgrades to the network and do it in a way that is actually safe and smooth like I don't think people realize just how complex this thing was as I

mentioned at the start of this episode it felt smooth but it required so so much work to get to that point of feeling smooth and that's the thing with uh these kind of upgrades is that all the work will go into it but they'll the the people that actually use the network most of them will have no idea about that and that's totally fine that's obviously what these people sign up for they know that uh their work is not going to be I guess like appreciated to the fullest by most of the people that use it but that's that's fine like I don't think they need that validation but I'm definitely going to give them that validation because I know how hard it was and I know a lot of you guys do as well um and it basically reinforces the fact that we are building something that can

work that can ship that can actually deliver value to people so all the other coming upgrades after the merge as I outlined in this tweet here are the surge The Verge The Purge the Splurge right they're all coming they're all being built uh there is more confidence in the ethereum ecosystem than there ever has been and these are happening in parallel as well look ethereum has never been in a better place than it is today it really just is amazing how far we've come in three years guys I mean 2019 was not a long time ago like we're in September 2019 mean sorry September 2022 September 2019 was an extremely dark time for ethereum one of the darkest I think the darkest was probably the end of 2019 but September was just as dark and in three years we have completely

turned that around to ethereum being in the best position it's ever been the future of ethereum being brighter than it has ever been and ethereum's reputation as a uh or I guess like um ethereum uh being this credibly neutral sediment layer that we want it to be is just becoming more interviewed like we see it we see it we just need to build towards it we just need to get this stuff shipped because as I've said we're only about halfway through the ethereum roadmap but we'll get there and I'm more confident than ever that we'll get there like I have I have no doubts now honestly like even pre-merge I didn't really have any doubts but I think it's basically at this point in time impossible to say that ethereum is not going to continue to execute on its roadmap when it just delivered the

hardest part of its road map there is some debate about that actually some people have said to me well you know this part's actually harder than the merge to do this part being potentially dank sharding but I don't know if I agree with that because while dang sharding is still an open research problem um the thing about it is that like it it in my mind it's not as complex or it doesn't require as much coordination and it's not as critical as the merge like I think we can get away with proto-dang shining for a very long time for example so from that lens I don't actually think it's more complicated but that's a debate for it for another time um but yeah I mean all in all the future of ethereum has literally never looked brighter I mean I I honestly can't think of a period in time in my time in

ethereum where I felt more confident happier with the direction that ethereum is going and more excited for the future now what am I going to talk about for for the future well everything that I've listed here obviously I'll still keep updating you guys on stuff happening at the application layer and layer twos and all that good stuff there but the merge conversation is pretty much over at this point I think maybe over the next few days I may talk about the merge a little bit more just as we get more Recaps and more threads and blog posts about it I'm sure there's going to me plenty of those but after that I mean that's it we're on proof of stake uh and there are upgrades coming to previous take ethereum but it's not going to be anything like the merge but we have the surge to look

forward to I think we'll be in you know obviously six to 12 months after the merge with the Shanghai update Beacon chain withdrawals all that good stuff there and just everything around it like there is so much still to talk about guys like the reason why I dedicated this episode to only the merge is because I felt it was relevant and and prudent just to do a whole episode on the merge but funny enough there was actually some other things that that happened today and I'm actually going to talk about one of them at the end of the episode to close us out uh but yeah I mean the building never stops the ethereum train never stops and we have just kind of like upgraded ourselves we basically put jet packs on the ethereum train now so I I don't know if you can hear it in my voice but I'm more excited

than I've ever been but I'm gonna leave that one at that for now uh last two things about the merge so we had the first Mev boost block that was mined so Mev boost was activated a few epochs into the um the merge and it seems to be going all well and good there is a bunch of relays as I mentioned before that are being used so it's not just flashbots as relay that it's being used there's a there's a bunch of them out there I think there's five so there's flashbots there's blocks throughout there's manifold there's Dreamboat from block native there's and then there's also I believe Eden uh he's doing a relay as well so you can basically choose which one you want from them which is very cool but yeah me V boost seems to be working so if you're running a solo

validator if you're running a rocket pool uh validator as well you can kind of up upgrade your node or at least kind of attach Mev boost to it as like the sidecar to make sure or upgrade your validator I should say to make sure you're capturing that Mev Revenue there right finally bordell.wtf it's a website that we were all refreshing frantically and monitoring frantically uh uh in the lead up to the merge well amario Havel here the uh I guess developer or owner of bordell.wtf uh gave some stats so it was refreshed over 13 million times from Midnight UTC to the merge that was about six hours so refreshed over 13 million times from 7 million unique IP addresses in six hours before the merge with 130

000 unique user agents bit of adidos at the end that did go down at the end uh and he apologized if they couldn't reach it before the merge uh but thank you for using bordell and happy merge everyone this was my source of Truth uh eventually bordell and that 797.io website came to the same consensus on when TTD would be reached around 641 or 6 42 am UTC and it happened around then and also we had most of the hash rate still just stick with it till the merge actually happened I believe the hash rate was still around 750 or 800 terahashes I believe it peaked at 1.1 Peter hashes so it didn't come down that much and around the merge it was going down but then it was going back up so it seemed like the miners were like well

I'm gonna shut them down anyway or I'm going to move to a really unprofitable coin anyway so I may as well just keep mining till the merge and the way TTD worked is that it didn't really matter if we lost a lot of hash rate it would still get hit and it wouldn't be that much of a delay maybe a few hours later but yeah the timing actually sucked for most of the world I think it ended up happening Early Morning Europe time which wasn't that bad but it really did suck for us uh and uh and Canada and South America as well because it ended up happening uh very late at night for them uh but I'm sure they stay if they stayed up for it they knew it was worth it to do that uh because at the end of the day that the merge is worth staying

up for I mean I would have done it happened at the perfect time for me I mean it was like what three uh what actually I can't remember the exact time because I was too distracted by the merge but it was like three or four pm or something like that my time so it worked perfectly for me and I've still got all my energy now I'm recording this at 9 30 p.m my time and I've actually got at 11 PM a live stream a post-emerge live stream that I'm doing with uh David Hoffman on Bank list with DC investor and uh superfizz so you should definitely go watch that after you've done with the reform maybe you've already watched it because the refill obviously goes out later than 11 p.m um I I I'm quoting Australian Eastern Standard Time right now not UTC uh but

yeah I think that's everything on the merge recap as I said there's one other thing I'm going to talk about but before I move on to that I just wanted to again say to any ethereum I guess Court of apples or researchers that watch or listen to the refuel thank you so much for all of your work over the years uh obviously the work doesn't end here you're going to keep doing the amazing work that you've been doing but from the bottom of my heart really thank you it is a huge Monumental achievement that we've all achieved as a community today but you guys being the developers and researchers especially without you this would not have happened so I'm sure you're all celebrating uh but if you are listening to the refuel thank you for that as well I appreciate that uh but yeah that's gonna be everything on the

merge uh moving on to the last thing I wanted to talk about was this uh tweet date from Brian Armstrong obviously the coinbase CEO here saying that starting today coinbase will begin integrating their crypto policy efforts right into their app these will help our 103 million verified users get educated on the crypto positions held by political leaders where they live so this is obviously for the US politicians only I don't think they're doing it for any other country right now but I think this is really important because when I guess like you're voting for a politician uh if you obviously in us or otherwise having access to the information of like what their stance on crypto is and what they're I guess kind of like Holdings

are or and I mean this won't show you their Holdings but that is obviously important as well but having kind of like their policy stance on crypto is incredibly important especially in a post tornado cash sanctions world where we've basically on the world stage of a policy now of Regulation and as I've said plenty of times before this regulation is going to keep stepping up as time goes on and we need to educate our politicians we need to educate our Representatives about crypto and make sure that they don't over regulate it they don't come down on us really hard with regulations because as much as I think that they're not going to long-term work anyway because we're building actual decentralized structure it's still going to hamper adoption it's still going to punish people that are

doing nothing wrong so we definitely don't want to go down that path if we can avoid it so I thought this was just a really cool thing that coinbase has done here I hope they do it in other countries as well not just the us but it will give you a glance of what uh I guess like crypto policy or positions each representative has in the US and and also where they live so obviously each Congress person uh where they live and each representative of where they live there so you can go check out Brian Armstrong's tweet thread for more details on that there uh yeah the Tweet thread is actually quite short but as Ryan said he actually I like this energy coinbase I do really like this energy from coinbase lately I know as I've said before they get a lot of for you

know a lot of the things that in the past that they have done that weren't exactly great but they've really stepped up their game I think uh lately especially when it comes to things like client diversity remember they were a really big uh really big um player in getting that client diversity fixed on the consensus layer because they were using over 90 percent prism well now I think they're only using 40 or 50 prism which was a huge Improvement and same with Kraken I should give credit to crack in there as well they did a really great job um but yeah coinbase is just really stepping up they're doing a lot of stuff uh within their coinbase Mobile Wallet app uh for D5 which I think is really really cool and they just seem to be on the right side of crypto history here so

kudos to them for that I hope it continues into the future but I think on that note that's going to be it so I guess welcome to the post merge World guys welcome to the post uh daily gray I post merge daily wave world all the refuels are going to be in a post merge World from now on uh there's not much else I can say that it hasn't been said already but uh yeah I'm I'm obviously going to be super excited to keep covering ethereum as time goes on uh we've got all those other upgrades to look forward to so as usual if you haven't yet please subscribe to the channel uh and uh also you can subscribe to the podcast as well uh because I do do this in podcast format for those of you who don't know and you can give that

video a thumbs up up on YouTube as well it really helps uh subscribe to the newsletter of course join the Discord Channel because a lot of great conversations going on in there but that's it I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone