T-Minus ~32 Hours
It feels surreal that I'm even writing this post, to be honest. I remember talking about Ethereum 2.0 way back in 2017 and how it was coming soon... Obviously the word soon is all about perspective, so I guess technically it has been coming soon for years. With all that being said, it's almost time. The Ethereum merge will disable Proof of Work mining on the Ethereum blockchain and change the consensus mechanism to Proof of Stake. This is something that has yet to be done at scale and in a live environment, so naturally people are a little nervous.
I was in the LeoFinance Discord for the AMA this morning and there were people talking about it. People were asking what they need to do to be safe during the merge. I've seen questions like this literally everywhere, and I'm here to demystify the whole situation. The amount of scams and misinformation around this topic is astronomical, but completely expected. There are going to be so many scams and shit popping up over the next 24 hours it's going to be like a circus.
There's literally one thing you have to do to prepare for the merge. People will tell you to take funds off exchanges, which is always a good practice regardless of the situation because.. Not your keys, not your coins. Sure, do that. Aside from that, the only other thing you have to do is NOTHING. There's no official new tokens or anything like that. There's no swapping your ETH for new ETH. None of that nonsense people are talking about.
Of course you are going to see a lot of talks about forked chains and such. For example, there is a group of miners that are planning to fork the chain and keep the Proof of Work version of Ethereum alive as a new token called ETHW. Please understand that these tokens that you are going to see popping up left and right are not official Ethereum tokens. The only official ETH is the same ETH you hold in your wallet right now. You're not going to get an airdrop of ETH2 tokens, or really any other form of airdrop from Ethereum.
Obviously, it's web3 and blockchain. Anyone can take the Ethereum code and create a fork of the chain. This mean that you are going to see bad actors trying to take advantage of the merge event. People are going to send you weird DMs on every social media. People are going to send you weird emails saying to connect your wallet to swap your tokens. You'll get scam messages from "exchanges" like coinbase saying to do all kinds of weird stuff, I'm sure. Do not interact with these messages or click on any random links.
These kinds of things happen all the time, hell there was even a ton of scam tokens created after Queen Elizabeth passed within hours. Rug pulls, phishing attempts, and straight up malicious airdrops. We choose to use these decentralized systems, but we don't take enough responsibility for our own assets. There's no one that can help get back the crypto a scammer takes from you.
Any and all communications about the merge will be available on Ethereum.org. If you're a node operator or anything like that, there may be something for you to do but all that info is available on the link above. As a regular pleb like myself that does nothing more than hold ETH and use the Etheruem blockchain for degen stuff, there is NOTHING YOU NEED TO DO. Just keep calm, and another great practice would be to not attempt any transactions on the Ethereum chain during the merge. We don't know what will happen.
Odds are, everything will be fine aside from a few hiccups. There has been ample testing and this upgrade has been in development for a very long time. With that being said though, there's no way to know what will happen until they push the upgrade to the main net. I'm confident that it will go fairly smoothly, but I doubt it will be flawless. It's a beautiful thing that's about to happen. Like watching a new rocket launch, the countdown is ticking. Strap in. The Merge is coming.
Article written by: @l337m45732 AKA 0xNifty.nft
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta