Today, September 15, a fundamental event for the world of cryptocurrencies took place – the biggest update was released called Merge, which officially switches Ethereum to the Proof-of-Work model instead of Proof-of-Work. The developers have been preparing this update of the cryptocurrency system since 2016, each time delaying the event for another year. But now, the market is about to fundamentally change as Ether, the second most important cryptocurrency in the world, moves to full decentralization using minimal electricity costs. And if earlier Ethereum was criticized for dealing a significant blow to the ecology of the planet, now everything looks much more attractive.

Maybe it’s worth explaining the difference between Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. When using the Proof-of-Work model, users were rewarded in ETH for work done, and this reward was tied to the computing power of the system. Accordingly, miners used farms from video cards, making a good profit, but at the same time consuming insane amounts of electricity. With the Proof-of-Stake model, it is no longer necessary to mine virtual currency on video cards – now cryptocurrency holders receive a reward for placing their holdings. This means that the more currencies a user has, the more money they will receive as a reward for processing transactions.

And given the fact that in this format, mining literally nothing is necessary anymore, the global energy consumption for coin mining should decrease by 99.95%. Yes, that’s right, now only 0.05% of the energy consumption is required to process transactions and other mechanisms before switching to the Proof-of-Stake model. Of course, this is just a preliminary estimate by the Ethereum Foundation, but in the absence of graphics card mining, electricity demand should really drop a lot. I’d also like to point out that the major update has hardly impacted the cryptocurrency rate – at the time of publication, the value of “Ether” lost $1,600, about 0.05% of the daily rate.

At the same time, this news for gamers is really great – now that there is no point in mining for video cards anymore, the secondary market will be flooded with video cards at very low prices, and new models will probably not be sold. crazy prices like a year ago.