We can now confirm that the Bellatrix upgrade is set for September 6th, with the Merge officially beginning on September 15.

The release of the 2.0 mainnet-ready clients just went live, those running 2.0 nodes are instructed to complete all required upgrades by Sept 6th, when the Bellatrix upgrade will happen.

After this, all that's left is the ACTUAL merge to Ethereum 2.0!

Out of all the milestones behind us, I have to say the the most impressive was seeing how the community came together to meet the requirement of 524,000 Ether deposited in the 2.0 contract in order to launch, and seeing that surpassed by over 400%. 

It's safe to say the crypto community is beyond ready for this to happen.

What do you need to do?

If you have no idea what any of the above means, you probably don't need to do anything.  

Everyone who is simply HODLing some Ethereum can relax, everything will happen automatically. 

If you do know what the above means, you probably don't need us to explain anything - the only thing I've seen some people unaware of is that you'll need to have BOTH an execution client (like Besu) and consensus client (like Teku) - so make sure you do, or you'll be pretty useless to the network post-merge.

The Upgrade After the Upgrade...

Once ETH2.0 is live, there's already one major change set to happen sometime in 2023...possibly 2024.

As mentioned already, a huge drop in the amount of computing power needed comes with the initial change to ETH 2.0, the following upgrade makes an equally drastic change to the amount of storage space needed.  

Combine these two factors, and the doors open for phones and various other low-power computers to run Ethereum.  The more devices participate, the more secure the network is. 

It's called 'sharding'. In simple terms, if you wanted to operate a node (which is basically the new way to mine Ethereum) it still requires downloading the entire Ethereum ledger, the database of all transactions in the history of Ethereum.  Thousands of computers maintaining this record is how 1 person trying to cheat immediately stands out, and fraudulent transactions are rejected.

Currently to mine Ethereum you'll need around 120GB disk space if running Windows, and half that if running Linux.   While not a huge amounts for a computer, it's more than most mobile devices.

But with sharding, the database gets split among all the computers on the network.  With a network the size of Ethereum, there's no additional security risk as a copy of every portion of the database will still exist on thousands of computers.

For those who want to get more involved...

With all the excitement around ETH 2.0, many people are looking to do more, like staking their coins and starting to earn more ETH for participating. 

As mentioned, nodes replace miners in ETH2.0 - and many people have an old laptop sitting in a box somewhere that is powerful enough to run one. Because they require significantly less computing power, they also use a significant less amount of electricity. Under the current system of miners, that same laptop probably wouldn't mine enough to cover the electricity costs.

You may be thinking "that sounds great" you may even have an old laptop in the closet collecting dust - well, the bad news is that in order to launch a node there's a requirement to own 32 ETH ($50,000 worth at time of publishing).

The upside is, you won't need to dust off that old laptop - you can participate in a pool.  This is where any number of people, dozens, hundreds, whatever, all contribute their ETH towards reaching the required 32 to launch node, with profits split depending on the total percentage someone contributes.  Many major exchanges will be running pools, some, like KuCoin are already accepting deposits and paying rewards. 

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Author: Justin Derbek
New York News Desk
Breaking Crypto News