According to Watcher Guru, we are only 12,554 away from the Ethereum Merge, which is expected to happen at 1:09 on September 15 (CST). By then, Ethereum will have transitioned to PoS, a major blow to PoW miners in the network. The Merge will force PoW miners that operate the $19 billion mining business to find alternatives.
Source: https://watcher.guru/ethmerge
Recent data shows that Ethereum miners are fleeing from the network. Right now, the average computing power of the whole Ethereum network stands at 854 TH/s. Trending downwards during the past week, the figure has dropped by about 19% from the peak in May. Ethereum’s massive PoW hashrate is of great significance to the entire crypto mining industry, and the ETH hashrate will shift to other PoW coins once Ethereum shifts to PoS, which may reshape the whole mining sector.
Facing the impending transformation of the mining sector, Ethereum miners might exclude themselves from the shift to PoS by the Ethereum community to protect their own interests. From this perspective, PoW miners on Ethereum might root for a hard fork to preserve the existing PoW chain and generate a new coin. However, such a fork coin can be problematic in terms of risks and security. If Ethereum is forked, projects within today’s largest crypto ecosystem will have to make a choice. Meanwhile, multiple mainstream projects, covering the two stablecoin issuers Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC), the oracle ChainLink, and the on-chain lending protocol Aave, have stated their support for the PoS chain. Without support from popular projects, the PoW chain will be worthless.
Of course, some miners might choose to accept the reality and switch to ETC. The DAO hack split the Ethereum community into the ETH camp and the ETC camp. The two now differ in terms of algorithm, and ETH mining machines might need to go through firmware updates to become compatible with ETCHASH, the ETC mining algorithm. Despite that, there is no technical barrier between ETH and ETC, and it is cheap to switch from one to the other. As such, it is foreseeable that the ETC hashrate will soar after the Merge.
In response to the current boom of ETC mining, many pools, including ViaBTC, have been offering mining benefits. Back in early September, ViaBTC Pool announced that it will terminate the pool’s PoW mining service and the revenue calculation of ETH when the TTD reaches a set threshold. The pool said that asset management…
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