The Ethereum Wars: Miners, Stakers, Forks And Merges

Ethereum has had a colourful history, which can help us understand what will happen in the future.With the merge coming, some are proposing another ETH hard fork, not unlike the one that gave birth to Ethereum Classic.What's the best form of Ethereum?Thesis SummaryEthereum (ETH-USD) is the world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, and since its inception in 2013, it has had a colourful journey to the top. Ethereum has been the victim of hacks, forks and now a controversial update, the "merge", which could shake things up in the Ethereum ecosystem and even lead to the creation of yet another form of Ethereum.In this article, I talk about Ethereum's past to understand its future better.A Brief History of EthereumEthereum was founded in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin with the help of other household crypto names such as Gavin Wood and Charles Hoskinson. Ethereum was built from the start with the idea of allowing anyone to create decentralized applications. The project began to develop under a swiss company, Ethereum Switzerland GmbH, but would later become a non-profit organization known as the Ethereum Foundation.On 30 July 2015, the Ethereum platform was officially launched, and the genesis block was mined. Since then, Ethereum has undergone numerous protocol upgrades and changes to its structure, with one of the most significant being the hard fork that took place in 2014, which led to the creation of Ethereum Classic.In 2...