Surviving the Merge

A tale of two forks

Welcome to the first article of the Pickle Jar! I’ll be using this Substack to write occasional longer-form content that doesn’t fit well on Twitter or the BowTiedIsland. Follow to stay up to date with my turbo-posting!

I recently did a guest post for BowTiedBull, in which I broke down the Merge and the following Ethereum roadmap upgrades. I may be biased, but I strongly feel it’s the most coherent, accessible overview of why the Merge is necessary, and what actually happens during it. I want to expound a little bit on something I mentioned in that article - forking during the Merge.

Let’s set one thing straight - when the Merge happens, there’s a 99% chance there’s going to be a fork. Even if it goes fully according to plan.

Any miner running older software will not be aware that the Merge exists. From its point of view, many other miners will stop producing valid blocks - and it will merrily continue to build on the PoW blockchain head.

Miners may run old software because the operator forgot to update them, or maybe the operator does not agree with the philosophy/implementation of the Merge. Maybe they’ve got some degenerate play in mind to try to loot the PoW chain before the ice age grinds it to a halt. Whatever the case, there are almost certainly going to be people mining after the merge.

Your job, as a user, is to not get screwed by this.

Note that you don’t have to do anything to convert your funds to proof of stake. Anyone telling you otherwise is a scammer. From a perspective of Ether sitting in your wallet, nothing will change. The blockchain state doesn’t care about the consensus layer change.

Neither should you be worried about your funds being “stuck” on the old chain. The only state that matters is the blockchain state at consensus. The new consensus after a successful merge will not include any blocks built on a PoW fork.

Non-consensus blockchains are worthless. I can copy the entire state right now, start mining on PickleChain, and claim that I’ve copied your Ether balance - doubling your money! Follow me for more easy ways to become a millionaire overnight.

I wish I was joking about that, but Richard Heart did just that with Pulsechain. He just forked the entire state and baited a bunch of low IQ patsies into giving him real money for his fake copied assets. Sad to see people get taken in by charlatans.

No, dear reader, the thing you realistically need to be worried about during the Merge is integration hell.

The Merge is probably one of the most well-tested changes to core code in the history of programming. The odds of something happening with the Merge itself are quite low. That does not, however, guarantee it will be a seamless transition.

Ethereum does not exist in a vacuum. Oracles, CEXes, RPC providers, node services, and anyone else interfacing with the blockchain will have to be sure that their systems will tolerate the merge.

Their endpoints must be redundant, their nodes updated, their I’s dotted and T’s crossed. It is entirely possible that we will see oracles giving weird data, erroneous CEX price feeds, RPC providers returning incorrect data, etc. Downstream users, like MEV or liquidator bots, may not be configured correctly, and may act erratically.

With that in mind, you are recommended to do some important housekeeping ahead of the merge - unwind any lending positions, particularly ETH-denominated ones. We may have a brief kerfuffle and txns may execute slowly or at weird timing, and you don’t want to be fighting to get a txn through under extreme network conditions or provider outages to save your bag from a faulty oracle price. If you don’t pay back your debts completely, at least bring them down to a very conservative health factor.

Unwind your positions, keep the majority of your tokens tidily in your wallet, and take a vacation from the blockchain for a day or two while the dust settles. Let things calm down. ETH will be there when you get back. This is not the time to be carrying leverage.

.