Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin celebrates the merger: "Dream for years"

Moments before the big Ethereum merger, co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared his enthusiasm and PoS vision with the community.< /p> New

As the countdown ticked down to the final moments of the great Ethereum (ETH) merger, co-founder Vitalik Buterin joined the "Ethereum Mainnet Merge Viewing Party" livestream hosted by the Ethereum Foundation to share his final thoughts.

When asked if he was excited about the merger, Buterin said he was "absolutely thrilled to be out of the proof-of-work era."

The co-founder went on to say that the network's historic transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) has been on the agenda for years.

"[It] has obviously been a dream for the Ethereum ecosystem since pretty much the beginning. We started the search for proof-of-stake with this blog post on Slosher in January 2014."

The Merge can be seen as a reinvention of the laws of physics, according to Buterin. PoW works with the use of real-world functionality such as electricity, hardware, and computers. Whereas with PoS, everything is virtualized, "which basically allows us to create a simulated universe that has its own laws of physics."

Buterin said that among the main drivers for change are high costs and massive energy consumption. Fusion is said to drastically reduce energy consumption by 99.95%.

Related: The "Rocket Launch" — Observers on Ethereum's post-merger future

He also pointed out that not only would this be good for the environment, which has been a hot topic among environmentalists about the crypto space, but also for “non-environmental externalities.” The example was given of the rise in GPU price due to ETH mining.

Shortly after Vitalik's mini projector in the...