Title: EL_Merge_Client_Release_Naming
Category: Working_Groups

Author: timbeiko
Date: 2022-01-07T16:50:55.345Z

“The Merge” refers to the process of moving Ethereum to proof of stake. This includes, roughly:

Releasing EL and CL clients which support this functionality;
The network difficulty on Ethereum exceeding the TERMINAL TOTAL DIFFICULTY;
The first post-PoW blocks being created by validators using their EL + CL node combination;
Ethereum finalizing post-merge.

The CL clients have chosen the name Bellatrix for (1). I’m opening this thread to discuss the options for EL clients to name their equivalent release.

Author: ualtinok
Date: 2022-01-07T17:02:40.426Z

echo “Bellatrix” | rev
Xirtalleb
Looks good on the panda merge meme

Author: shemnon
Date: 2022-01-07T18:30:37.809Z

Malaspina Glacier.
It is a composite glacier being fed mostly by Seward Glacier and Agassiz Glacier, i.e. it is the glacier that is a merger of multiple glaciers.


en.wikipedia.org



Malaspina Glacier
The Malaspina Glacier (Lingít: Sít' Tlein) in southeastern Alaska is the largest piedmont glacier in the world. Situated at the head of the Alaska Panhandle, it is about 65 km (40 mi) wide and 45 km (28 mi) long, with an area of some 3,900 km2 (1,500 sq mi). It is named in honor of Alessandro Malaspina, a Tuscan explorer in the service of the Spanish Navy, who visited the region in 1791. In 1874, W.H. Dall, of what is now the U.S. National Geodetic Survey, bestowed the name "Malaspina Plateau" It...

Author: EvanVanNessEth
Date: 2022-01-07T18:36:12.415Z

imho the fork should be named Paris
https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1479521576404062212

Author: tjayrush
Date: 2022-01-07T18:43:17.941Z

We should call it “Finally.”

Author: matt
Date: 2022-01-07T18:46:35.171Z

I am in favor of finally using “Serenity” for an official release. I realize that Serenity has generally referred to both the upgrade to PoS and the introduction of sharding, but I think merging the EL and CL is momentous enough to overlook that

Author: taxmeifyoucan
Date: 2022-01-07T19:28:00.812Z

Serenity was also my initial thought but I would be careful with it. It might be confusing for the public since it is widely understood as ‘Eth 2.0’, with sharding as you say.

Author: domothy
Date: 2022-01-07T19:41:58.969Z

Execution layer scheme: City names
Consensus layer scheme: Star names
Merge is about EL and CL coming together, therefore a “merge” or “compromise” between cities and stars would be a logical choice. What’s between the earth and the stars? We got the athmosphere, planets, solar system, asteroids, etc. (the only nearby star would be our sun but I think we’d all oppose calling the update “SOL”). Continuing that train of thought maybe “Horizon” would be a cool name? “The Horizon fork”, all about going beyond the horizon. I dunno. Kinda fits with earlier fork names like Homestead and Frontier.
Otherwise take the name of a fictional city from SciFi that’s settled somewhere in space?

Author: Quez
Date: 2022-01-07T20:30:24.246Z

What about Los Angeles as the City of Stars? Thus we combine a name of a city with a hint to the stars.

Author: a35u
Date: 2022-01-08T06:00:45.093Z

Holocene, the period after glaciers. From the Greek for words for whole and new. Led to a flourishing of human civilization.

Author: abcoathup
Date: 2022-01-10T01:08:48.289Z

@shemnon ice age delay upgrades have been two word glacier names.
Recent execution layer upgrades have used single Devcon city names:



More frequent, smaller hardforks vs. less frequent, larger ones Process Improvement


    I suggest to use Devcon locations past Istanbul: 

(devcon 0: berlin?)
devcon 1: london
devcon 2: shanghai
devcon 3: cancun
devcon 4: prague
devcon 5: osaka

After 2.5 (?) years that would mean we need to have more devcons or switching naming convention

Author: radek
Date: 2022-01-10T10:34:06.160Z

Being a diver I suggest Halocline.
This is the place where 2 different substances meet.


en.wikipedia.org


Halocline
In oceanography, a halocline (from Greek hals, halos 'salt' and klinein 'to slope') is a cline, a subtype of chemocline caused by a strong, vertical salinity gradient within a body of water.  Because salinity (in concert with temperature) affects the density of seawater, it can play a role in its vertical stratification.  Increasing salinity by one kg/m3 results in an increase of seawater density of around 0.7 kg/m3.
 In the midlatitudes, an excess of evaporation over precipitation leads to surfa...

Author: jassmin
Date: 2022-01-11T09:05:54.847Z

Either Tigris or Euphrates

Author: microbecode
Date: 2022-01-12T20:54:15.045Z

A big and important merge: the end of something and the beginning of something else.
To celebrate the end:

Terminus (‘end of transportation line’, fits nicely with old testnet metro station names)

To celebrate the beginning:

Origin
Sprout
Inception

Author: q9f
Date: 2022-01-14T12:18:17.829Z

Best proposal of this thread so far is Serenity - just a running gag on behalf of the initial Ethereum roadmap (Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), super suitable for EL clients 
Notably, we only named hardforks after city names because they were all part of the initial Metropolis milestone; we are leaving Metropolis now and entering Serenity. 
Runner-up is “Halocline” it’s both a beautiful term and a adequate metaphor.

Author: cdili
Date: 2022-01-19T06:00:03.019Z

Gaia
Gaia… is the personification of the Earth. It’s short, relatively unique, and may pair well with Bellatrix.
I am not an environmentalist, but I think we want a name that commemorates the significance and deeper meaning of the release.   It is not just a Merge, or where two things meet, or where something ends… we want to convey why…
Uniqueness is helpful when future generations search for the details and stories about the release. A weakness of proposed names like “Paris” and “Serenity” is that when searching for “ethereum paris” or “ethereum serenity” there will be many articles unrelated to this historic release…
If the other contender is Malaspina (or Halocline), it is too complicated and too many syllables: do you want to say Malaspina or Gaia?
For uniqueness, I think city names were a poor choice for EL names. If city names are still desired for future EL releases, I still think this one release can and should be unique and not follow that trend.


en.wikipedia.org


Gaia
In Greek mythology, Gaia (/ˈɡeɪə, ˈɡaɪə/; Ancient Greek: Γαῖα, romanized: Gaîa, a poetic form of Γῆ (Gê), meaning 'land' or 'earth'), also spelled Gaea (/ˈdʒiːə/), is the personification of Earth. Gaia is the ancestral mother—sometimes parthenogenic—of all life. She is the mother of Uranus (Sky), with whom she conceived the Titans (themselves parents of many of the Olympian gods), the Cyclopes, and the Giants, as well as of Pontus (Sea), from whose union she bore the primordial sea go The Greek n...







ethereum.org



Ethereum Energy Consumption
The basic information you need to understand Ethereum's energy consumption.

Author: jflo
Date: 2022-02-08T22:20:29.849Z

I like the idea of a city with stellar connotations.
Paris is the City of Lights
Tuscon (Arizona, USA) is regarded as the Astronomy Capital of the World for its cloudless skies and clear nights.
Atacama, Chile also has a very fair claim to that title.

Author: timbeiko
Date: 2022-03-03T20:21:04.099Z

We’ll be having a breakout room next Friday 14:00 UTC to settle this  if you feel strongly about the name of the upgrade, please join! Info here: EL Merge Client Release Naming Breakout Room · Issue #491 · ethereum/pm · GitHub