Ever since Ethereum – the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization in the world – moved its consensus mechanism to “Proof-of-Stake”, the Ethereum community has seen drastic changes in its ecosystem.
The event, which became known as “the merge”, became the most talked about cryptocurrency occurrence of the year.
Ethereum set the merge as the first milestone for future updates that promise to drastically improve the blockchain’s speed capabilities. Changes that would not only make blockchain faster – but also influence Layer-2 blockchains like Polygon.
However, roughly a month after the merge – significant changes to Ethereum can already be seen.
For instance, Ethereum now uses 99.9% energy to run the blockchain – making it a lot more environmentally friendly.
Also, it was recently confirmed that Ethereum is now deflationary. After abandoning Proof-of-Work, the production of Ether became a lot less prominent. ETH production is now 98% slower than it was under PoW.
Abandoning Miners
In order to transition to a staking consensus mechanism, Ethereum had to abandon the second-largest mining community in the world – only behind Bitcoin.
This news was not well received by everyone – especially those who invested time and money into mining Eth for profit.
After the merge, over 250 thousand ETH miners were left without a token to mine.
That vacuum created the opportunity for an Ethereum forked token to be created.
EthereumPow is now the home for over 5 thousand former Ethereum miners.
Guo’s Criticism Of Vitalik Buterin
Chandler Guo, a well-known Ethereum miner, and ICO investor became one of the faces of EthereumPoW over the last few weeks. In fact, Guo came out of requirement just to promote ETHW.
Representing the mining community, Guo has harsh criticisms about how “the merge” was conducted.
In an exclusive interview with BeingCrypto, Guo claims that Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder, “forced their hands” regarding the merge.
“So the miners are kind of angry about that, so almost everyone went to the ETHW,” Guo told BeingCrypto. “Twenty mining pools and 5,000 miners.
I think Vitalik helped me to push this and push the miners towards ETHW.”
According to him, Ethereum made a mistake by fully committing to staking.
His view claims that the transition gave the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission an opportunity to “take control” of Ethereum – by claiming that under staking, Ethereum could be classified as a risk asset.
Guo also spoke about how the Binance Smart chain had to go through maintenance during the merge – and that made the chain go out for days. “A blockchain could never shut down on PoW” he added.
In a final jab to Vitalik – Guo claimed that perhaps Ethereum would be better off without Buterin’s leadership.
“It’s like Bitcoin without Satoshi Nakamoto,” Guo said. “Ethereum without Vitalik Buterin is maybe much better.”
