A Researcher’s Opinion: Bitcoin Price May Fall After Ethereum Update

Kyle McDonald, an independent researcher active in the field of digital currencies, said that since Bitcoin will no longer be the only major proof-of-work blockchain after the Ethereum update, it may come under the microscope of legal authorities and as a result Its price will also decrease.

To Report Coin Desk, McDonald’s advice to investors, in the current situation, is to sell Bitcoin. The reason for this researcher is that the successful change of the Ethereum network mechanism from proof of work to a less consuming (in terms of energy) proof of stake model may eventually lead investors and legal authorities to believe that the use of the more consuming proof of work model that Bitcoin and Ethereum They both use it up to this point, it’s never been a necessity.

MacDonald’s emphasis is on the importance of climate crises and massive energy consumption in the Bitcoin network. He says that since the Bitcoin community is not as coordinated as Ethereum to abandon the proof-of-work model, it could be the first blockchain to face legal action for its high energy consumption.

High energy consumption in networks hosting digital currencies has become one of the main points of contention between environmental activists and governments, and according to MacDonald, with these conditions, Bitcoin will “never experience the price of $69,000 again”; A level known as the all-time record for the price of Bitcoin.

It is expected that the change of Ethereum network mechanism to proof of stake, which is referred to as Merge, will be done in the coming weeks. After that, miners’ hardware will no longer be needed to maintain the network. Macdonald also says that the prediction of a 99.95% reduction in energy consumption in the Ethereum network after the Marj update is quite realistic.

This researcher has said about changing the Ethereum network mechanism:

When you move your activity from a system dependent on 10 million GPUs worldwide whose goal is to generate random numbers as fast as possible, to an active system with a few thousand very low-power computers, there will be a big difference in your work.

To track energy consumption and carbon production in the Ethereum network, McDonald’s uses a service called “Ethereum Emissions trackerhas launched “, which takes an estimated look at the energy consumption and carbon production in this blockchain, without considering the price of Ethereum or the cost of electricity.

He said that to collect the data of this graph, he considered the hash rate of the network and according to the ability of the mining hardware, he calculated the maximum and minimum amount of electricity needed to reach this hash rate.

The danger that threatens the Ethereum network

The risk that MacDonald says threatens the Ethereum network and is related to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is that miners will turn to activity in possible proof-of-work hardforks of Ethereum after the collapse.

If this happens, he said, there will likely be a duplicate of each Ethereum NFT on the forked Ethereum Proof-of-Work chain for a short period of time, which could negatively affect the value of these NFTs.

However, OpenSea, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has said it will only support Ethereum’s proof-of-stake network and is preparing to update its platform to make sure everything goes smoothly. went