Ethereum 2.0 is launched as scheduled, where will PoW miners go?

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The launch of Ethereum 2.0 is a hot event with the highest attention in the circle recently. In early November, Vitalik released the address of the Ethereum 2.0 Staking deposit contract, which instantly detonated the industry. On the day of launch on December 1st, basically the whole industry was watching this highly anticipated mainnet launch event. In the entire history of the blockchain, no public chain launch has received such a high degree of attention.

At present, the phase 0 beacon chain is launched on Ethereum 2.0. The beacon chain is a core component of Ethereum 2.0. As shown in the figure below, in addition to the phase 0 beacon chain, Ethereum 2.0 has two main phases, phase 1 and phase 2. Recently, the Ethereum Foundation has revised its roadmap. The sharding scheme used in phase 2 in the figure below is frozen, and the Layer 2 scheme Rollup is used instead to solve the crucial scalability problem of Ethereum.

After the revision of the roadmap, there is no official TPS estimated data, but we can make a simple guess. At present, the TPS of PoS mechanism chains in the industry is generally above 1500, and Layer 2 can theoretically achieve tens of thousands or even higher TPS. When hundreds of Layer 2 are running, combined with the high TPS of the PoS network, the performance improvement will be Exponential.

first level title2. Can PoW still be mined?The popularity of DeFi this year has caused super congestion on Ethereum several times, and the gas fee is unacceptably high even in normal times. But at the same time, the high gas fee of Ethereum makes the miners earn a lot of money. QKL123 data shows that since May, with the popularity of DeFi, the Ethereum network fee has continued to soar. It can be seen from the figure below that the growth rate is extremely huge, saying

Miners are the biggest winners of the DeFi boom,

Not at all excessive.In this case, many people may feel that since

Ethereum 2.0 is online, will PoW mining be impossible? Let's talk about this issue below.

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3. The difficulties of Ethereum 2.0 and the prosperity of DeFiAlthough the launch of Ethereum 2.0 went very smoothly, the subsequent stages of Ethereum 2.0 still face many difficulties. The idea of ​​the Ethereum Foundation is to use the Rollup expansion solution to solve the performance problem of Ethereum. Compared with the original sharding solution, the difficulty of the Rollup solution has been reduced, that is, the difficulty of upgrading Ethereum has been reduced.But actually

The overall time spent will not be reduced by much

, but the certainty of the success of the upgrade has increased a lot. It also greatly reduces the number of people who have doubts about the upgrade of Ethereum due to the difficulty of fragmentation development, increasing the certainty of the prosperity and development of Ethereum.Why doesn't the time decrease by a lot? Because the design of Ethereum 2.0 itself is also very complicated, and the integration of 1.0 and 2.0 requires very rigorous testing, which requires a lot of time. A large number of applications are running on the Ethereum network, and a large amount of assets are stored. It must be very difficult to achieve a major upgrade on a high-speed network. At the same time, judging from the past history of Ethereum, almost none of the upgrades of the Ethereum network went online without delay. In the field of public chains, delays in launching are very common.At the same time, the Ethereum ecosystem is still booming,

According to data from Dune Analytics, the current number of DeFi users has exceeded 1 million.

This is a testament to the power that DeFi holds. The popularity of DeFi started in the middle of this year, and by the end of the year, the number of users exceeded 1 million. Considering the high threshold of DeFi, this can be said to be a very rapid growth.

At the same time, Grayscale and other institutions continue to buy ETH. The picture below shows Grayscale’s ETH holdings. It is currently close to 3 million, and the number of ETH purchased by Grayscale has gradually increased recently. As can be seen from the figure below, Grayscale bought 130,000 ETH on December 8 alone.

With the vigorous development of DeFi, the Ethereum network fee will remain high for a long time, which will still be a bonus period for miners. And with the increasing amount of Ethereum 2.0 Staking and DeFi lockups, as well as the continuous buying of institutions such as Grayscale, the scarcity of ETH is rapidly increasing, and the atmosphere of hoarding and mining coins is heating up. Overall, it is still the prime time for Ethereum PoW mining.

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So how long can the PoW chain of ETH 1.0 be mined? There is currently no clear answer. But what is certain is that before Ethereum completely transforms from PoW to PoS, the Ethereum Foundation must use enough time to prove to everyone that the PoS chain is safe. Only in this way can all developers and users complete the switch with confidence, so that the entire ecosystem worth more than 100 billion US dollars can truly and completely run on the beacon chain.

No one knows how long it will take to complete the progress of the project. This is a big unknown, and these unknowns may be a big resistance to the conversion of Ethereum 2.0. Therefore, we optimistically estimate that the PoW chain can continue to be mined for at least two to three years.

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PoW mining leaderboard December 9, 2020

Judging from the revenue data of PoW mining, during the consensus upgrade period, the market value and mining output of Ethereum are second only to the PoW consensus network of Bitcoin, and it still ranks first in the computing power of graphics cards. It can be seen that Ethereum is still the best choice for graphics card mining.So for those who are mining or are about to join Ethereum mining, what kind of posture should they take to welcome Ethereum 2.0? How should novice miners enter the market?

1. Speed ​​up equipment upgrades.Since the DAG file of ETH is about to be full of 4G, the mining machine with 4G graphics card is about to be eliminated. For old miners, they should upgrade their equipment to 8G graphics cards as soon as possible to continue to occupy the main position of the Ethereum network. For beginners in mining, it is also necessary to avoid picking up a 4G graphics card mining machine without knowing it.

2. Occupy the cost advantage.For miners, the key factor determining the payback cycle is mining costs, including electricity, custody, maintenance, and more. Before the advent of Ethereum 2.0, look for mines with more cost advantages and management levels, and shorten the payback cycle as soon as possible, so as to minimize risks while enjoying dividends.

3. Find the right time to enter the market.Due to the outbreak of DeFi, Ethereum is also ushering in a critical period of transformation 2.0. The value of Ethereum is being discovered by more and more people and institutions. Judging from the current point of view, for Ethereum miners who are pursuing long-term stable returns, it is likely to be the best opportunity to obtain bargaining chips at a low cost, and it is also the last time to enter the market.Jointly sponsored by the Blockchain Institute and the one-stop physical mining machine mining platform - Geek Mining, through group buying of mining machines, centralized hosting, zero management fees, and interest binding,

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Disclaimer: The Blockchain Institute is organized based on public information and does not represent the position of the Blockchain Institute (official account), nor does it constitute any investment opinion or suggestion.