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On September 21, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin retweeted a tweet saying that he "sleeps 7-8 hours a day." A netizen replied: "No wonder Ethereum 2.0 has not arrived yet." The two biggest changes of Ethereum 2.0 are the adoption of the "beacon chain + shard chain" structure and the change of the consensus mechanism from the current PoW to PoS. According to Vitalik Buterin, "After the PoS consensus algorithm is implemented, Ethereum will be more secure than Bitcoin and the cost of attack will be higher." The first to be affected by the change in the consensus mechanism are undoubtedly Ethereum GPU miners. Some time ago, thanks to the outbreak of the DeFi market, Ethereum mining has become a hot commodity in the eyes of many people, and 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 current Ethereum GPU miners. So, the question is, how long can the gold mine of Ethereum last? After the transition to PoS, what will happen to these Ethereum graphics card mining machines? 01
Ethereum 2.0 When Ethereum was first created in 2015, the development team developed a development roadmap for Ethereum in the next few years, which includes four phases: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity. The first three phases belong to the Ethereum 1.0 era, and the fourth phase, Serenity, will allow Ethereum to slowly transition to the 2.0 era. According to the currently published roadmap, Ethereum 2.0 will include 3 phases: Phase 0: PoS Beacon Chain Phase 1: Data sharding, but not computational sharding (i.e., the shard chain will “contain” up to 2 MB/sec of data, but the data will be dummy data objects, not transactions) Phase 2: Transaction Sharding (Sharded Transaction Processing Function)
The latest news is that on October 12, ConsenSys researcher and Ethereum 2.0 developer Ben Edgington wrote that the creation of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain is expected to be realized within six weeks. As for the recently popular rollup expansion technology, although Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has repeatedly called on the community to pay attention to and use rollups, and even wrote an article earlier this month detailing "If rollups are used as the center of Ethereum's future development, how should Ethereum's roadmap be adjusted?", he also frankly stated that the scalability of Ethereum's base layer still has a long way to go, and it is likely that the expansion of the blockchain base layer will not be possible for many years. Ethereum 2.0 is much more complex than 1.0 in terms of technology, and each stage requires more time to develop, test, and update. From the perspective of engineering workload, Ethereum 2.0 cannot be completed in a year or two. 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 large number 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. According to the current mining income, the static payback period of Ethereum graphics card mining machines is generally about one year (largely affected by Ethereum transaction fee income), and it is almost impossible for Ethereum to complete the 2.0 upgrade within the next year. According to the predictions of some senior miners in the industry, Ethereum 2.0 will take at least two years. There was a joke that was widely circulated on the Internet before, saying: If Ethereum 2.0 succeeds, the price of the coin will soar, and miners will get their money back in advance; if it fails, 1.0 will continue mining. In any case, miners will be invincible.
Although this is a joke, it also indirectly shows that Ethereum miners have a high safety cushion. Even if Ethereum 2.0 with PoS consensus mechanism is launched, the 1.0 chain will still exist for quite a long time , and there will be a transition period of "two chains running at the same time". Therefore, Ethereum miners don't need to worry now. 02
If mining is no longer possible, what will happen to Ethereum mining machines? At present, the main force of Ethereum mining machines is graphics card mining machines, which mainly rely on GPU for mining. If Ethereum 2.0 is really online and running stably, and the possibility of 1.0 causing block generation due to difficulty bomb is very small, these graphics card mining machines will also have other places to go: The first place is to mine other currencies. One of the advantages of graphics card mining machines is that they can mine a lot of currencies, and many small mining coin project owners also welcome the addition of graphics card mining machines, because the more computing power added, the higher the cost of 51% attack, and the higher the security of the blockchain. Not long ago, ETC (Ethereum Classic) suffered multiple 51% attacks in succession, and had to reorganize the blocks afterwards. Due to frequent 51% attacks, some exchanges have stopped ETC deposits, while others have increased the deposit arrival time to 10,000 block confirmations, which greatly affects the user experience. ETC and ETH were originally the same company, both using the Ethash algorithm, but now ETC's total network computing power is less than 2% of ETH's computing power. Currently, ETC has no plans to upgrade to the PoS consensus mechanism in the future, so after Ethereum graphics card miners can no longer mine ETH, it can be expected that a considerable portion of the computing power will be used to mine ETC. Comparison of the total network computing power of ETH and ETC, source: 2miners
In addition to ETC, GPU miners can also mine other currencies such as Grin, BEAM, CKB, RVN, XMR, BTG, AION, etc. 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. The current total network computing power of Ethereum is about 249.65TH/s. According to the average computing power of 300MH/s per graphics card mining machine, there are about 800,000 graphics card mining machines in the entire network. Other small mining coins cannot fully accommodate so many mining machines and computing power, which will inevitably cause some graphics card mining machines to withdraw from the mining market. The second destination for graphics card mining machines that have withdrawn from the mining market is to dismantle and sell them for their residual value. The residual value of a general graphics card that has been used for two years is about 30% of the market price of a new graphics card. These graphics cards can flow into the consumer market and be sold to gamers, image processing companies, etc.; while the residual value of customized graphics cards (commonly known as "mining cards", which have many output interfaces and unnecessary functions cut off) is very low. Therefore, miners who are preparing to enter Ethereum mining now are best to choose a general-purpose graphics card. 03
summary Ethereum 2.0 is like a sword of Damocles, but currently Ethereum miners do not have to consider this risk at all, because the static payback period of current graphics card mining machines is generally about one year, and Ethereum 2.0 has to go through multiple stages, each of which is a huge project. It is almost impossible to complete it within the next year. Of course, if it really comes to the stage where Ethereum mining is no longer possible, these graphics card miners can also choose to mine other currencies, or sell the residual value and exit the mining market. In order to sell at a higher residual value, miners who are preparing to enter the Ethereum mining market now are recommended to choose a general-purpose graphics card. Risk warning : The content of this article is only the author’s personal opinion, does not represent the views or position of Zhikuang University, and does not constitute any investment opinion or recommendation.
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