Ethereum’s Merge is another epic fail

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Ethereum blockchain users and promoters were ecstatic last week as the long-delayed ‘Merge’ finally happened.

For those who don’t know, the Merge transitioned Ethereum from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake one. The Ethereum community has been promoting this as some sort of revolutionary change for years.

Yet, as CoinGeek predicted countless times, the Merge has been a huge letdown with no discernible improvement to Ethereum on a technical level.

It’s yet more hot air to pump the price of ETH tokens while delivering nothing of real value to anyone.

ETH’s price has tanked since the Merge was complete

There were no immediate technical difficulties with the Merge, to be fair to the Ethereum team. It’s not like the Ethereum blockchain crashed and burned or anything.

However, aside from transitioning to a consensus mechanism that is falsely touted as more environmentally friendly, the Merge achieved nothing. There has been no reduction in Ethereum’s notoriously high transaction fees, the throughput of the blockchain has not increased at all, and, as predicted, the token price of ETH has tanked as insiders offload on newbies taken in by the hype and buzz around the update.

The Merge was completed on September 15. ETH reached a recent high of $1,638.56 on that day. Since then, it has tanked to $1,340 at the time of writing, briefly dipping below $1,300 as the stampede for the exits reached fever pitch.

Contrary to the hype and misinformation on Twitter, CryptoVinco, previously known as CryptoWhale, spelled it out:

I knew the #Ethereum merge would be a complete failure for its price when the devs came out and said it would have no effect on fees.

There’s a 0 chance will $ETH succeed if gas fees are $850 for a single transaction. That’s ridiculous.

— WhaleWire (@WhaleWire) September 18, 2022

Indeed, while Ethereum developers hype solutions that do nothing to address scalability or fees, Bitcoin SV continues to scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second at sub-cent fees without fanfare. It’s classic misdirection by the vested interests that control blockchain industry media.

Replay attack on the EthereumPOW Chain

After the Merge, Ethereum miners dissatisfied with the transition to proof-of-stake continued mining on the Ethereum blockchain, and some moved to Ethereum Classic.

Blockchain security company BlockSec discovered a replay exploit that allowed a user to mint 200 ETHW tokens within days. According to the alert, the user moved 200 Wrapped ETH (ETHW) through the Omni bridge of the Gnosis chain. They then replayed this same message on the EthereumPOW chain to get 200 extra ETHW.

Sensible observers of this mess might conclude that tinkering endlessly with protocols, building bridges between many unscalable blockchains, and constantly trying to do the equivalent of rebuilding an aircraft mid-flight isn’t a good idea. Perhaps that’s why Satoshi Nakamoto said Bitcoin was “set in stone” when he released it.

Ethereum is a failed project that was never necessary

It has been the better part of a decade since a hopelessly naive 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin released the Ethereum white paper. Yet, after all this time, Ethereum is no closer to scaling, its fees are still ridiculous, and it remains the source of the majority of scams in the digital assets industry.

With the Merge failing to deliver any technical benefits other than transitioning to a problematic consensus mechanism that will only make the richest Ethereum holders richer, it’s time to declare Ethereum a failed project and move on.

If only Buterin had understood Bitcoin’s innate capabilities all those years ago, and if only BTC Core had not prevented him from building on Bitcoin like he wanted, none of this would have been necessary. It could all have been built on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the endless other failed blockchains would never have existed, and the world would have a truly scalable peer-to-peer electronic cash system as Satoshi intended.

Sadly, it didn’t play out that way. However, all is not lost. While Ethereum continues to deliver damp squibs, the original Bitcoin was saved and is growing into an unstoppable monster handling millions of transactions every day.

Developers looking for a scalable solution that delivers should turn away from the repeated lies and letdowns of Ethereum and test what BSV can do.

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