Crypto, the death of a Queen and the birth of The Merge

19 Sep 2022

Two big media events happened in recent days which were entirely unrelated, other than representing a triumph of planning and execution. The first was codenamed Operation London Bridge – the death of Queen Elizabeth and her subsequent funeral. The second was The Merge, the riskiest and most complex real-time software upgrade attempted. The death of a monarch and the birth of proof-of-stake blockchain.

How were these different? Well, scale for one thing. According to one report, Operation London Bridge was expected to be the most watched television broadcast of all time, exceeding 4 billion people. One can imagine the organisers were, er, motivated not to make a balls-up.

The Merge managed 41,000 real-time viewers (it was not as much of a visual feast, to put it mildly) of which I was one, with tens of millions more checking in on Twitter for updates. A far smaller audience, to be sure. But with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, I expect The Merge organisers were as least as motivated as the funeral planners, and perhaps more so. I didn’t watch the funeral, but the approximately 15 minutes as The Merge crossed the line and settled was a moving experience, nevertheless.

The Merge, certainly the most important event in crypto since Satoshi’s white paper in 2008 – and the most anticipated crypto event – went off without a hitch, a good seven years after it was floated and about four years since its development started in earnest. I wondered for a moment how long the Queen’s funeral had been planned. Perhaps for some time, given her longevity.

There was one similarity though, which was the sniping that started quietly and then exploded across social media. On the one hand, the voices of those wishing to (at least partially) blame the Queen for colonialism – a debate I would be wise not to enter – and on the other, those commentators in the very different but also fraught world of crypto-zealotry, who roared their insults and objections around abstractions like decentralisation and deflationary monetary systems.

Not to conflate colonialism with consensus protocols, of course, but a $1-trillion crypto economy does sometimes raise temperatures, especially in a world where economic uncertainties seem to loom larger than ever.

I watched The Merge on the official YouTube site rebroadcasting the software developer Zoom session of The Merge. Lots and lots of youngish faces, mostly men, some scraggly and bedraggled (presumably from lack of sleep), many accents from around the world, some grinning with anxiety, some expressionless.

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The screens that showed up on YouTube were pretty arcane – graphs and scrolling code and little green squares looking like an enormous Wordle game. The Zoom invitees knew what they were looking for; the rest of us stared somewhat slackjawed until the big moment was memorialised via an imposing and oversized text-composed graphic on a black-and-white screen which read – “POS Activated”. A great nerdy cheer went up around the world.

Why should anyone care more about this than an impressive procession of a monarch-bearing hearse though London, replete with mourning commoners and finely dressed officials of the Crown? Why should one care about this at all?

At the risk of overreaching here, it seems to me that the one event represented a subdued farewell to an era, history weighing heavy, a reflection on things past and an appreciation of a person who seemed to radiate titular dignity among the tumult of her government’s engagement with world affairs.

The other represented a view of the future, a testament to human innovation, our ability to tackle problems of near-impossible scale and to engage in that most distinctive differentiator of Homo sapiens – the ability to plan ahead, envisage scenarios and wrestle the beast of uncertainty using nothing more than intellect and logic.

Many with an interest in crypto were immediately interested in what happened to the ETH price. What will happen to Bitcoin? Will there be a miner revolt? What are US regulators thinking? Who wins and who loses?

For me, it was more important than that. I have sat through podcasts of what it took to do this as $1-billion flowed through the network daily, in real time. The levels of complexity and the details of coordinating 200 developers in teams around the world were, to put it mildly, astonishing.

It was, quite simply, one of the great technological feats of recent decades.

I am told that the late Queen’s funeral procession was quite something to behold too.

(I have not covered what The Merge actually means to crypto users – for those who are interested, this was covered in my article of 29 August.) DM

Steven Boykey Sidley is Professor of Practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg.

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