The Ethereum network’s transition from a Proof of Work (PoW) agreement has flooded the crypto industry with idle ETH miners, causing significant disruption to all PoW tokens.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Andy Long, CEO of Bitcoin miner White Rock, believes that the upcoming Ethereum integration will force PoW miners to look for greener pastures like other PoW blockchains and thereby “swamp” other coins – increasing mining difficulty and reducing profitability.
“When GPU miners point their hardware to other chains, their difficulty increases, resulting in lower returns and splitting the rewards among more miners.”
Long added that the migration could force many crypto miners to leave and abandon their precious mining rigs.
“Hashrate flows into alternative GPU Pow coins, and many miners simply give up and try to sell their card farms,” he said.
He added: “Some miners try to sell their high performance computing (HPC) or GPU cloud services and probably fail because there is too much capacity to chase limited demand.
Due to the fall in the price of Bitcoin (BTC), GPU prices and demand have been falling, causing some cards to be sold below cost and sellers struggling to sell their miners and cards at inflated prices.
No matter what happens after the merger, Long said he is “not strongly opposed” and is interested in seeing “how market forces play out.”
“When I built GPU farms in 2017, convergence was mentioned as an imminent threat, and it will have more impact than that.”
“There will always be some GPU-optimized chains coming out, but I doubt we’ll ever get back to the revenue levels seen in ETH Proof of Work.”
Ethereum is expected to transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism between September 10-20 and is considered one of the most significant reforms in the crypto market this year.
Related: The largest Ether mining pool Ethermine has opened a new ETH staking service
However, there are many cryptocurrencies set to continue on their PoW path, including Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), as well as Ethereum Classic (ETC), Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC). ) and Ravencoin (RVN).
White Rock Management is a Swiss digital asset technology company that issues cryptocurrencies through data centers located in Texas and Sweden.