What to mine after Ethereum moves to PoS?
Ethereum’s transition journey from PoW to PoS finally comes to one of its most crucial phase as Ethereum devs released latest version Geth v.1.10.22 on August 22nd. The version enables the Merge for the Ethereum mainnet at a Terminal Total Difficulty of 58_750_000_000_000_000_000_000. This TTD is expected to be reached on the 15th September 2022. Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) specifies the end of Proof of Work (PoW) and when Proof of Stake (PoS) will begin. For more details of the merge, please refer to Mainnet Merge Announcement.
Ethereum’s end in PoW can be disastrous to PoW miners in mining revenue and payback period. As can be seen below, Ethereum network hashrate is 926TH/s, that is the hashrate of around 15 million pieces of 3060 Ti cards. Which coin or coins will take those hashrate after Ethereum’s PoS transition is still a question.
The fork of ETH — ETHW
Grayscale discussed the feasibility of the ETHW hard fork and the impact of the event on ETH and ETC on its official website. The blog post concluded that the ETHW fork would face significant challenges due to the complexity of DeFi and the proliferation of asset-backed tokens. While the chances of success are expected to be low, some support for PoW forks has emerged from miners and exchanges. So far, speculation on the ETHW token has resulted in a steady price drop of more than 50% since its launch, while the price of ETC is up around 9%.
In addition to the declining interest in the ETHW, major Ethereum protocols and players, such as Tether and Circle, have expressed support for ETH PoS as a canonical chain — an important sign of support since the two companies are responsible for a large number of on-chain asset-backed tokens. If the protocol finds that token holders do want to change the protocol base on a PoW variant, they will likely prefer ETC instead of replicating the on-chain ecosystem on ETHW.
Till now, we haven’t seen many public releases from exchanges, wallets or mining pools on whether ETHW will be supported. But nothing is certain before it happens. There are still possibility for ETHW to take most of the hashrate.
ETC is also one of the top choices
Originating from Ethereum, ETC is seen as the “real Ethereum”. It has experienced a long and difficult survival process, from the core of Ethereum to the shadow of Ethereum, and now it seems to be the biggest successor of Ethereum.
The algorithms of ETC and ETH are not exactly the same, but most of the mining rigs on the market can mine ETH and ETC at same time without many changes or upgrades. As of now, ETC has a great ecosystem and community, and the price is rising, so most ETH miners chose it as their first candidate.
However, it is unrealistic for the huge amount of hashrate for ETH to only transfer to ETC. Otherwise, with the current difficulty and price of ETC, there will be no profit for any miner. So, that brings us to another question: are there other coins to choose from?
We have interviewed some miners on this topic. Besides ETHW and ETC, the other coins that Ethereum miners interested in are RVN, CFX, ERGO, etc.
Following form is the comparison between these coins.
If you are mining Ethereum with your ASIC or GPU miners, please cast your vote on which coin to mine and which coin you’d recommend us to support. We will value every of your feedback.
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