CoinDesk's article on the Ethereum Merge combines technical financial reporting with advocacy for scientific collaboration and environmental responsibility. The piece features balanced multi-stakeholder coverage while prominently foregrounding a 99.9% energy reduction as a major achievement in community and environmental stewardship. Primary UDHR engagement centers on scientific participation (Article 27), freedom of information (Article 19), and duties to community (Article 29).
I gotta say, I’ve been really cynical about this and honestly thought Ethereum would keep putting off the move to PoS forever. I’m very very happy to be wrong.
I still don’t see the value in cryptocurrency as a project, but now that it’s not rolling back years of renewable energy development, I’m down to have some much more interesting conversations about Ethereum, and I may even be willing to buy some and try it out.
> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date.
I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to catch up with what's going on with crypto these days? I'm not planning to "buy" crypto; I would like to understand the technicalities.
For those interested in understanding the tech rather than the typical bashing things as beneath them, I wrote up a detailed technical explainer of how Ethereum PoS works: https://0xfoobar.substack.com/p/ethereum-proof-of-stake
Unlike BTC the miners can sell their gear so they are not down on their investment.. I imagine BTC miners putting up a good fight if this was on the table and they stand to lose all their asics
There are two interesting things I want to watch from this. The first is I'm interested to see what kind of bull run ETH goes on. The merge has been incredibly long coming, it has huge risks and I think that puts downward pressure on price, you really don't want to be doing stuff in ETH at the moment because there's a fairly good chance something goes wrong, someone stealds $XBn and runs off and the Ethereum guys go "Well I guess we're going to have a centralized intervention and reset the chain back to date Y" (this famously happened with the first DAO). So as that risk dissipates I would expect a decent price run. I'll be very interested if that doesn't happen since it says a lot about broader market conditions.
The second thing I'm interested in is that ETH was the vast majority of revenue for GPU miners. I read an article on HN a few months ago about how once ETH is gone the rest of the PoS chains put together won't yield enough revenue to be profitable for the vast vast majority of current ETH miners. This alone could have a massive ripple effect on the used GPU market. Interesting to see where that goes.
> “Proof-of-stake is like running an app on your MacBook,” he said. “It's like running Slack. It's like running Google Chrome or running Netflix. Obviously, your MacBook plugs into the wall and uses electricity to run. But no one thinks about the environmental impact of running Slack, right?”
People do think about that. But definitely an improvement!
Congrats to the devs. This is a historic moment for computing and distributed tech, and will pave the way for Ethereum’s next updates: scalability, privacy, stronger censorship resistance, easier UX and account abstraction.
I appreciate it wasting less precious energy. But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right?
The wealthy actors are the ones dictating the transaction now and they also on top get paid for being rich. This does not sound like a "better financial system" for me. Also, don't forget the DAO Fork[0] where with the "ungovernable Blockhain" it was decided a transaction was not ok and it was removed?!
What boggles my mind is that there is no withdrawal from staking and almost no one talks about it. That is, staking right now is a one way street with a promise to be able to withdraw some time in the future and returning only about 4% gross annually, which is laughably low for something that risky. It's well hidden in Ethereum press releases, the only mention I can quickly find is the FAQ entry titled 'Misconception: "The Merge enabled staking withdrawals."' here [1].
It's not just about transparency either. The whole system's security rests on game theory. Not being able to withdraw must affect incentives, which means the introduction of withdrawals will change the system in ways that were not tested yet.
> “I feel very proud, you know, that I'll be able to look back and say I've had a role to play in removing a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere every week." -- Edgington
There's a very important difference in not emitting carbon into the atmosphere and actively removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Both are critically necessary and complementary, but I don't see how Edgington thinks that switching off PoW suddenly makes Ethereum carbon-negative.
Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it.
With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it.
Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it may be an incremental improvement over traditional global finance because there is a much greater ability to publicly scrutinize what goes on.
But no one should consider this a fundamental paradigm shift & democratization compare to traditional financial systems controlled by a a very small number of big players. Their influence still can override the mining process that’s supposed to be the final word on transactions.
Although I’ll clarify a bit: I’m actually a proponent of having a layer of human judgement that can fix a problem when things go off the rails. The issue is that in crypto this layer is even less accessible to smaller players than in traditional finance. The DAO was able to throw its weight around and get a hard fork, but how many other groups with much less influence have suffered from similar problems and exploits without that same benefit?
Yes, even in traditional finance there are some types of irreversible fraud. But for every day transactions, for using money as a daily part of transactions necessary to live your life and not just as a speculative investment, crypto falls far short.
If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. If my wallet is pick pocketed or I simply lose it by accident I have a similar recourse to mitigate the fallout. Crypto? No. It may, eventually, have some other benefits though that’s yet to be seen. But as a major change & liberation of people from massively powerful banks and governments there seems to be nothing more that shouted rhetoric and wishful thinking.
I think this is nice, it forces people that want to participate to have skin in the game.
With proof of work there is incentive for people not invested in crypto to mine as much as possible and sell everything.
If a big enough computer is created, someone not interested in crypto can take money away from it, or if the computer is big enough even destroy it, a quantum computer for instance, should make a 51% attack on a network as proof it is a quantum computer.
I know it is unlikely, I myself think is impossible. But the incentive is there.
With proof of stake there is no incentive to do it, a 51% attack is idiotic since you have to buy so much.
> It's like Finland has suddenly shut off its power grid
So, have we observed global energy usage go down by about one Finland?
Shouldn't that be observable somehow? Shouldn't there be some power stations reducing their output as a reaction to reduced demand?
Anyone know how this would be visible, and on what kind of time frame we expect it to become visible?
I'm not claiming it hasn't happened. I just feel surprised to not see more coverage of that in this article, nor here in the comments. Energy efficiency is largely the point of this major change. Shouldn't there be graphs of the power grids everywhere showing a big drop? Maybe my expectations are just off on that.
PoW incentivizes renewable energy development. It's certainly not rolling it back.
It used to also incentivize GPU production, but as of today that has been diminished as well. Instead it is only current asset holders who reap the rewards.
I wouldnt worry, the whole system up to this point has used "technobabble" as a means to confuse and impress outsiders. When reading up on it, there is no meaning to find besides "yep, its a linked list allright".
I'm in the same boat. However, I'm holding strong in being ignorant, as I believe crypto is a fad with no inherent value. I'm an avid reader and learner, but only if the topic is interesting or makes sense. Cryptocoins meet neither of those criteria -to me-.
That can be difficult if you read tech news like us, but it will give me a small twinge of joy if I live longer than crypto. Guess we'll see.
Switch to a different currency that is still proof of work? I mean if you've got all the gear and just need to change was software is running and you get back to making money, wouldn't you?
The merge won’t affect gas fees, which makes Eth unsuitable for small purchases when the network is busy. Apparently Eth will do other work in future to fix that though.
Ethereum isn't supposed to be money (though it can be), it's fuel you use for doing other things. Do people use less oil because it's deflationary and gets consumed when used? No, because it's useful now.
The most likely end game for Ethereum is being a replacement for all backend financial systems. Instead of having to hire teams of people to verify things or integrate various legacy systems together, everyone can build on one neutral platform and pay a little ETH as the fee for using it.
- The block chain is a distributed ledger database, where all peers hold a full copy to avoid manipulation (faking an entry is only possible by controlling >50% of machines in this peer-to-peer network).
- Spending money is implemented by adding a transactional record to the blockchain ledger at the end saying X amount moved from account A to B. A block is like a page in a paper ledger and they are appended with cryptographic hashes to avoid improper interference.
- Ethereum supports smart contracts, which are little scripts in a language called Solidity. So you can implement legally binding (and unstoppable) contracts along the lines of "if (condition) then (pay some money to someone)". Executing smart contracts cost a little bit of money. All Ethereum nodes collectively implement a distributed VM, and that money (called "gas") is the incentive to keep the network running. Smart contracts are highly interesting, and they have applications far beyond electronic currencies. For example, we played with implementing electronic rights management (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-36691-9_... - which turned out to be less than ideal due to a stack size limit in the current Ethereum VM, but hey).
- Whenever a new block (page in the ledger) needs to be created because the previous one is full, a randomized alg. determines who is permitted to do that ("mining"). The old process (proof of work) was environmentally a disaster (it still is for the Bitcoin ecosystem), which is why the Ethereum people implemented a smarter method (proof of stake - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake).
>So as that risk dissipates I would expect a decent price run.
The risk you're describing is a social-political one. As long as the users do not fork with the etherium developers, that will not happen. Change to PoS has nothing to do with it.
I find the complexity of that algorithm both impressive ( since they seem to have made it work), but also quite worrying. I'm really not sure how such a beast can't be filled with bugs, not in the implementation but rather in the protocol.
I know a lot of very smart people are working on this, but i'd rather have something conceptually simpler to work as the base layer for a whole new economy.
i’m thinking it was a single person who just really wanted to be the first tx on the PoS chain. i’m not versed to decode transactions well — i wouldn’t be surprised if it was somebody making a “first PoS transaction” NFT or something.
regarding price, one can argue it both ways. at the point of the merge, most assets on ethereum are risky: if you were a uniswap LP and the two assets you were pooling chose different forks as their “official” one (most meaningful for off-chain collateralized assets like USDC), you can bet arbitrageurs would have left you holding the worthless asset on both chains. accordingly, Eth became the “safest” asset during the fork, since both forks will recognize it. that would create buy pressure leasing up to the fork, which goes away after the fork.
but there’s a million arguments on both sides of that picture. i think the strongest argument for price direction is that PoS miners are less likely to sell their Eth immediately after mining it than PoW miners because the latter purchased mining equipment with USD and want to repay that, whereas the former are invested in Ethereum itself instead of their mining equipment. also it sounds like block rewards are decreased with PoS, so the currency itself is deflationary now (?)
One, they are going to sasturate the market which will drive the prices down significantly. They cannot not saturate the market, because GPUs age due to new developments by manufacturers. This already makes the prospect of recouping initial investments rahter dim.
Consider that non-miner market has a huge distain for miners and are willing to pay premium on new cards just to stick to the miners. I don't think resale value is going to be spectacular.
In terms of ROI, the 3060 with 12GB of RAM seems to be the best one for cheap. The M40 has 24GB of RAM too but the core is super slow.
I'm personally holding out for prices on 3090s to crash. Also, NVIDIA is rumored to be launching their new GPU series in 2 weeks (there is a scheduled event already).
It isn't really over yet. This must have had a fairly radical impact on the incentives of the people who are involved in running the network since random outsiders can't muscle in any more. We don't know what that does the economics of the project from just the first couple of hours. I'm going to be checking back in on Ethereum after 1 and 12 months to see what really happened here.
Having read your article, I still don't understand one part. The claim that the honest validators in the face of a malicious superminority can eventually leak them out, but a malicious supermajority cannot do the same to an honest superminority. I figure there would need to be some other mechanism that would tip the balance in favor of the honest validators, otherwise it seems like majority should always win.
The idea that because it's risky right now and that a decrease in risk will provide higher returns isn't necessarily sound. For example, playing a financial equivalent to Russian roulette won't give you higher returns. You can look at the countries titled with the euphemistic "developing markets" which have historically had extremely high risks AND a much lower return than in lower risk countries. The risk-return trade-off may be assumed often, but there are controversies, and it's underlying theoretical basis only holds in an efficient capital markets where market participants are capable of pricing risk. A bank can price the risk of a mortgage default, but how can you price the risk of anything in the Blockchain space, like say Ethereum getting completely wiped out by a hack, etc?
I have a very very large GPU farm. We switched to ETC, for now. Why? Because it is the easiest one that doesn't require retuning everything. GPUs are like snowflakes and each one of my cards are tuned for hash/power/stability, individually. It is an insane amount of work to do this because the failure mode is that the card (and machine) crashes.
It's also completely untrue. Staking is unprofitable if you cannot guarantee uptime of your node. In fact Ethereum includes slashing for inactivity, so not only do you lose out on rewards if you shut of your MacBook, you run the risk of losing Ethereum. Unless of course you stake with a centralized pool, which defeats the whole purpose.
Very strong positive. Environmental responsibility and community duty are central themes. Article emphasizes 99.9% energy reduction, comparison to Finland shutting off power grid, removal of 'megaton of carbon from atmosphere every week.' Quotes Ben Edgington expressing personal pride in reducing environmental harm and responsibility to family/community.
FW Ratio: 75%
Observable Facts
Article states 'Ethereum should now consume 99.9% or so less energy. It's like Finland has suddenly shut off its power grid.'
Ben Edgington quoted: 'I feel very proud, you know, that I'll be able to look back and say I've had a role to play in removing a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere every week. That's something that meaningfully affects my family and others.'
Tim Beiko quoted: 'I think the Merge can genuinely get those people who were interested in Ethereum, but skeptical of the environmental impacts, to come and experiment with it.'
Inferences
Repeated emphasis on environmental benefit and explicit framing as community/family responsibility strongly supports Article 29 duties to community and environment.
Strong positive. Article celebrates scientific and technical achievement, explicitly praising Merge as 'one of the largest open-source software endeavors in history' requiring 'coordination across dozens of teams and scores of individual researchers, developers and volunteers.' Vitalik Buterin quoted calling to continue building scientific ecosystem.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
Article explicitly describes Merge as 'one of the largest open-source software endeavors in history, requiring coordination across dozens of teams and scores of individual researchers, developers and volunteers.'
Vitalik Buterin quoted: 'let's go build out all of the other parts of this ecosystem and turn Ethereum into what we want it to be.'
Inferences
Prominent celebration of collaborative scientific achievement and open-source participation strongly aligns with Article 27.
Strong positive. Article presents balanced coverage with multiple stakeholder voices: technical developers (Drake, Beiko, Buterin), investors (Cuban), researchers, critics (Guo, skeptics). Addresses both benefits (energy reduction, security) and unresolved limitations (fees, speed). Factual reporting with transparent sourcing.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article quotes 7+ distinct stakeholders: Ethereum Foundation researchers, investors, miners, traders, and critics.
Article explicitly addresses both environmental benefits ('99.9% or so less energy') and technical limitations ('relatively high fees and slow speeds').
Content is publicly accessible without paywall or registration barriers.
Inferences
Multiple balanced perspectives and fair treatment of both benefits and limitations strongly align with Article 19 freedom of expression and information.
Public accessibility supports information distribution rights.
Article emphasizes collaborative scientific achievement and community coordination—'one of the largest open-source software endeavors in history.' Implicitly invokes reason, justice, and peace through technical progress.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article describes Merge as outcome of 'coordination across dozens of teams and scores of individual researchers, developers and volunteers.'
Inferences
Emphasis on collaborative reasoning and peaceful problem-solving aligns with Preamble's foundational values.
Article describes protocol that applies identical rules to all validators with automatic enforcement (slashing), supporting equality before law principle.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article explains validators are subject to uniform protocol enforcement including 'slashing' (penalty reduction) for rule violations.
Article emphasizes decentralized participation in governance and decision-making through proof-of-stake system where all validators have voice proportional to stake.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
Article describes system where governance power is distributed across validators rather than concentrated in mining pools.
Article notes Merge required 'coordination across dozens of teams and scores of individual researchers, developers and volunteers.'
Inferences
Emphasis on distributed governance participation supports Article 21.
Article describes major shift in property distribution (miners → stakers) and introduces protocol-enforced property slashing, presented as technical necessity rather than advocacy for or against property frameworks.
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
Article explains miners previously controlled mining pools and competed for rewards; replaced by validators who stake ETH tokens.
Article describes 'slashing' mechanism where violating validators have staked ETH automatically reduced as punishment.
Inferences
Property rights redistribution is presented descriptively without advocating positions on rightfulness or fairness.
Article reports miner displacement but does not engage with labor rights, worker transition support, or working conditions. Focuses on technical/market aspects rather than labor protection dimensions.
FW Ratio: 75%
Observable Facts
Article includes section header 'Goodbye, miners' and reports 'The Merge retires Ethereum's proof-of-work system, where crypto miners competed.'
Article mentions Chandler Guo's proof-of-work fork announcement as miner response but frames it as market activity rather than labor action.
No discussion of worker retraining, transition support, or labor implications.
Inferences
Absence of labor rights framing for worker displacement represents mild negative relative to Article 23.
How accessible is this content to a general audience?
moderatemedium jargongeneral
Longitudinal
· 6 evals
Audit Trail
26 entries
2026-02-28 07:39
eval
Evaluated by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001: +0.15 (Mild positive)
2026-02-28 01:55
eval_success
Evaluated: Neutral (0.02)
--
2026-02-28 01:55
eval
Evaluated by deepseek-v3.2: +0.02 (Neutral) 9,421 tokens+0.05
2026-02-28 01:55
rater_validation_warn
Validation warnings for model deepseek-v3.2: 24W 24R
--
2026-02-28 01:36
dlq_replay
DLQ message 97683 replayed to DEEPSEEK_QUEUE: The Ethereum merge is done
--
2026-02-28 00:05
eval_success
Light evaluated: Neutral (0.00)
--
2026-02-28 00:05
rater_validation_warn
Light validation warnings for model llama-3.3-70b-wai: 0W 7R
--
2026-02-28 00:05
eval
Evaluated by llama-3.3-70b-wai: 0.00 (Neutral)
2026-02-27 21:53
eval_success
Evaluated: Neutral (-0.03)
--
2026-02-27 21:53
eval
Evaluated by deepseek-v3.2: -0.03 (Neutral) 8,956 tokens
2026-02-27 21:50
dlq
Dead-lettered after 1 attempts: The Ethereum merge is done
--
2026-02-27 21:50
eval_failure
Evaluation failed: Error: D1_TYPE_ERROR: Type 'undefined' not supported for value 'undefined'
--
2026-02-27 21:33
eval_success
Light evaluated: Neutral (0.00)
--
2026-02-27 21:33
eval
Evaluated by llama-4-scout-wai: 0.00 (Neutral)
2026-02-27 20:52
eval
Evaluated by claude-haiku-4-5: +0.15 (Mild positive)
2026-02-27 00:47
rater_validation_fail
Parse failure for model deepseek-v3.2: Error: Failed to parse OpenRouter JSON: SyntaxError: Expected ',' or '}' after property value in JSON at position 17407 (line 381 column 4). Extracted text starts with: {
"schema_version": "3.7",
--
2026-02-27 00:47
eval_retry
OpenRouter output truncated at 4096 tokens
--
2026-02-26 20:06
dlq
Dead-lettered after 1 attempts: The Ethereum merge is done
--
2026-02-26 20:04
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-26 20:03
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-26 20:02
rate_limit
OpenRouter rate limited (429) model=llama-3.3-70b
--
2026-02-26 20:00
dlq
Dead-lettered after 1 attempts: The Ethereum merge is done
--
2026-02-26 20:00
eval_failure
Evaluation failed: Error: Unknown model in registry: llama-4-scout-wai
--
2026-02-26 20:00
eval_failure
Evaluation failed: Error: Unknown model in registry: llama-4-scout-wai
--
2026-02-26 19:12
dlq
Dead-lettered after 1 attempts: The Ethereum merge is done