On December 1st, Ethereum developer Tim Beiko issued an article explaining the impact of the merger of Eth1 and Eth2 on the application layer of Ethereum. Therefore, the merger aims to have minimal impact on the way Ethereum is the end user, smart contracts, and dapps.
There are changes to emphasize
- Block structure: The beacon chain block will contain ExecutionPayloads. Therefore, it is the merged equivalent of the blocks on the current proof-of-work chain. ExecutionPayloads is the place to interact with Ethereum.
- Mining and uncle block: Several fields in the proof of work block header are no longer used. Set it to 0 or the equivalent of their data structure. Because the proof of stake will naturally not generate uncle blocks like the proof of work, the list of uncle blocks will be empty. And the hash of the list will become the RLP-encoded hash of the empty list.
- BLOCKHASH and DIFFICULTY opcode changes: The pseudo-randomness of BLOCKHASH opcode will become weaker. Update the DIFFICULTY opcode and rename it to RANDOM. The average block time: currently about 13 seconds, reduced to 12 seconds after merging.
- Security header and final block: Under the proof of work, it is possible to reorganize. The final block is the block accepted by more than 2/3 of the verification nodes. To create a conflict block. The attacker must destroy at least 1/3 of the total pledge (currently about 2.5 million ETH, worth about 10 billion U.S. dollars).
The security header block is a block expected to be included in the specification chain under normal network conditions. Assuming that the network delay is less than 4 seconds, most verification nodes are honest. And there is no attack on the fork selection rule, the security header will never become an orphan block.