ETH Miners Will Have Little Choice Once Ethereum 2.0 Launches With PoS
Alejandro De La Torre, the vice president of Poolin — the sixth-largest pool for ETH — confirmed to Cointelegraph that “GPU mining is still dominant” for the Ethereum network, adding:
ProgPoW has not been integrated into Ethereum yet, and it is unclear when it will eventually happen — in March, core Ethereum developers were debating whether ProgPoW would actually benefit the network for almost two hours and failed to reach a consensus. Scheduled to launch later in 2020, Ethereum 2.0 is a major network upgrade on the blockchain that is designed to shift its current PoW consensus algorithm to PoS where miners are virtual and referred to as “block validators.”.
“There will certainly be a transition period where both networks are running,” Jack O’Holleran, the CEO of the Skale Network — a blockchain platform based on Ethereum — told Cointelegraph, elaborating that this process will take some time:
Once Ethereum runs fully on the PoS rails, miners will have two options. Nick Foster, a representative for United States-based mining equipment dealer Kaboomracks, told Cointelegraph that most ETH miners will pick the latter option:
Foster went on to describe how he switched to mining Ravencoin (RVN), an Ethash peer-to-peer blockchain asset, with his 3GB GPU unit once it became unprofitable to mine ETH: “It’s mining raven, and I sell to BTC instantly for stability sake and sell to USD to pay my power right after.