How long can Ethereum be mined? Where will the eliminated mining machines go?
Original title: "How long can Ethereum be mined?" Where will the eliminated mining machines go? "
Original source: Zhikuang University
On September 21, the founder of Ethereum V God reposted a tweet, saying that he "sleep 7-8 hours a day", and a netizen replied: "No wonder Ethereum 2.0 has not arrived."
The two biggest changes in Ethereum 2.0, one is the use of "beacon chain + shard chain" The other is the change of the consensus mechanism from the current PoW to PoS. According to V God, "After the PoS consensus algorithm is implemented, Ethereum will be more secure than Bitcoin, and the attack cost will be higher."
There is no doubt that the Ethereum graphics card miners will bear the brunt of the change in the consensus mechanism. Some time ago, thanks to the outbreak of the DeFi market, Ethereum mining has become a favorite in the eyes of many people. Both the number of people entering the market and the computing power of the entire network are growing rapidly. However, Ethereum 2.0 is like a sword of Damocles, because the PoS consensus mechanism does not require the Ethereum graphics card mining machine currently mining.
Then, here comes the question, how long can the gold mountain of Ethereum be dug? After the transition to PoS, where will these Ethereum graphics card mining machines go?
Ethereum 2.0
At the beginning of the birth of Ethereum in 2015, the development team Ethereum has formulated a development roadmap for the next few years, which are divided into four stages: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity. Among them, the first three stages belong to the era of Ethereum 1.0, and the fourth stage "Tranquility" will allow Ethereum to slowly transition to the era of 2.0.
According to the currently announced roadmap, Ethereum 2.0 will include 3 stages:
Phase 0: PoS Beacon Chain
Phase 1: Data shards, but not computational shards (that is, the shard chain will "contain" Data with a capacity of 2 MB/s, but the data are dumb data objects, not transactions)
Phase 2: Transaction Fragmentation (fragmented transaction processing function)
The latest news is that on October 12, Ben Edgington, a researcher at ConsenSys and developer of Ethereum 2.0, wrote that the creation of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain is expected to Achieved within six weeks.
As for the recently popular rollup expansion technology, although V God, the co-founder of Ethereum, has repeatedly called on the community to pay attention to and use rollup, he even wrote directly at the beginning of this month An article described in detail "if rollup is used as the future development center of Ethereum, what adjustments should be made to the roadmap of Ethereum", but he also said frankly that there is still a long way to go for the scalability of the Ethereum base layer If you want to go, it is very likely that the expansion of the blockchain base layer will not be achieved after many years.
Ethereum 2.0 is technically more complicated than 1.0, and each stage requires more time to develop, test, update and launch. From the perspective of project volume, Ethereum 2.0 cannot be completed within a year or so. As for how long it will take, no one (including Vitalik) can give a clear time point.
In addition, the current Ethereum carries a lot of funds, contract applications, and a lot of users. Every upgrade needs to take these into consideration. Therefore, the entire upgrade and migration process of Ethereum 2.0 will be very slow and cautious.
From the perspective of graphics card miners, there is no need to worry about the impact of Ethereum 2.0 on mining at all. According to the current mining income calculation, the static payback cycle of the Ethereum graphics card mining machine is generally about one year (it is greatly affected by the fee income of the Ethereum), and the Ethereum 2.0 will be completed within the next year. Upgrading is almost impossible. According to the predictions of some senior miners in the circle, Ethereum 2.0 will take at least 2 years.
A joke on the Internet was widely circulated in the circle before, saying:
Ether If Fang 2.0 succeeds, the currency price will skyrocket, and the miners will pay back their capital in advance; if it fails, 1.0 will continue to mine. Regardless, miners are invincible.
Although this is a joke, it also shows that the safety cushion of Ethereum miners is very high.
Even if the Ethereum 2.0 of the PoS consensus mechanism is launched, the 1.0 chain will still exist for a long time, and there will be a "dual chain running at the same time" "The transition period. Therefore, Ethereum miners need not worry now.
If you can’t mine, where will the Ethereum mining machine go?
Currently, the main force of Ethereum mining machines are graphics card mining machines, which mainly rely on GPU for mining. If it really comes to the stage where Ethereum 2.0 is online and running stably, and the possibility of block production due to the difficulty bomb of 1.0 is very small, these graphics card mining machines also have other places to go:
Not long ago, there were many 51% attacks on ETC (Ethereum Classic), and block reorganization had to be carried out afterwards. Because of frequent 51% attacks, some exchanges have stopped ETC recharge, while others have increased the recharge arrival time to 10,000 block confirmations, which greatly affects user experience.
ETC and ETH were originally a family, using the Ethash algorithm, but now the entire network computing power of ETC is less than 2% of the computing power of ETH. At present, ETC has no plans to upgrade to the PoS consensus mechanism in the future, so after the Ethereum graphics card miners cannot mine ETH, it can be expected that a considerable part of the computing power will be used to mine ETC.
Network computing power comparison between ETH and ETC, source: 2miners
In addition to ETC, graphics card mining machines can also mine Grin, BEAM, CKB, RVN, XMR, BTG, AION and other currencies. In addition, the blockchain industry is developing very rapidly, and many new projects are born every year. In the future, there will definitely be other new projects that adopt the PoW consensus mechanism.
Ethereum’s current network computing power is about 249.65TH/s. According to the average computing power of each graphics card mining machine 300MH/s, the entire network is about There are more than 800,000 graphics card mining machines. Other small mining coins cannot fully accommodate so many mining machines and computing power at present, which will inevitably make some graphics card mining machines withdraw from the mining market.
For graphics card mining machines that have withdrawn from the mining market, selling the residual value after dismantling is the second place to go. The general-purpose graphics cards that have been mined for two years have a residual value rate of about 30% of the market price of new graphics cards. These graphics cards can be sold to the consumer market and sold to gamers, image processing companies, etc.; and customized graphics cards (commonly known as "mining cards") , castrated off a lot of output interfaces and unnecessary functions) the residual value rate is very low.
Therefore, miners who are going to enter Ethereum mining now, it is best to choose a general-purpose graphics card.
Summary
Ethereum 2.0 is like a sword of Damocles, but currently Ethereum miners do not need to consider this risk at all, because the current static payback cycle of graphics card mining machines is generally about one year, while Ethereum 2.0 has to go through multiple stages, and each stage has a huge amount of work. It's almost impossible to do it within.
Of course, if it is really impossible to mine Ethereum, these graphics card mining machines can also choose to mine other currencies, or sell the residual value to quit mining mining market. In order to sell a higher residual value, miners who plan to enter Ethereum mining now are recommended to choose a general-purpose graphics card.
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