Multitudes of miners will no longer race to find the next computationally expensive hash. Proof of Stake does address the energy concerns of crypto.

At the expense of the “permissionless” nature of crypto, moving from “anybopdy can join with his GPU” to “you must pay the insiders to join the party”.

I also reveals how centralized ethereum really is in terms of who holds the power: a blockchain where the devs can screw the miners like this isn't really reassuring…

Bitcoin's carefully crafted balance of power (and the disapearance of Satoshi) lead to a technological deadlock where nothing can really change, while Ethereum's totalitarian governance model allows it to iterate on the technology, but lost the freedom ideal in the process …

You don't have to "pay insiders", you simply have to purchase an asset on a liquid market. You can pay me and a thousand other people, it doesn't have to be insiders.

The bigger problem with PoS is that there's no ongoing cost. Buy your stake, don't fuck up and you're making money. Not true with mining, and this changes the incentive landscape quite a bit.

> a blockchain where the devs can screw the miners like this isn't really reassuring…

It's not a screwing if they've known the roadmap the whole time....

Then you don't have issues with VISA or Mastercard censoring things, as it was in their TOS the whole time, right?

Does the merge come with any real world benefits? Besides now not needing the yearly power consumption of Belgium.

Like... Can i buy bread and milk with this thing any time soon?

From TFA:

> Misconception: "The Merge will reduce gas fees."

> False. The Merge is a change of consensus mechanism, not an expansion of network capacity, and will not result in lower gas fees.

> Misconception: "Transactions will be noticeably faster after The Merge."

> False. Though some slight changes exist, transaction speed will mostly remain the same on layer 1.

The only benefit of the merge is energy consumption will be reduced to about 1/1000th what it is now.

It also greatly helps with GPU shortages because they aren't needed for mining anymore.