Ethereum has been planning the transition to Ethereum 2.0 since its release in 2015, but now that the date for “The Merge” has finally been declared at the end of September, some crypto miners are threatening to split the blockchain. Ethereum’s upgrade will fix energy consumption issues by moving from crypto mining to staking, but ETH miners will lose their bread and butter.
Ethereum was the first blockchain to use smart contracts, small programs that can create cryptocurrencies, NFTs (or non-fungible tokens) and a wide variety of programs and applications. ETH has been the most profitable cryptocurrency to mine due to its ability to be mined with standard GPUs instead of the expensive ASIC rigs used to mine BTC, and this low entry cost has made ETH very profitable to mine, but now that Ethereum is moving from mining to staking this will no longer be possible.
Ever since The Merge was announced, a schism has emerged in the Ethereum community, forming two sides of a “Second Ethereum Civil War,” populated by crypto miners on the one hand who want to continue mining for ether (ETH) and Ethereum’s user base on the other hand who want Ethereum 2.0 to happen so that Ethereum can reach its full potential (and so that transaction fees can go down ).CoinGape provides a list of managers, miners and exchanges that have either declared their support for a “hard fork” to preserve cryptomining or who have condemned the idea. If a hard-fork takes place, a new cryptocurrency, ETHw, will exist alongside a new copy of the Ethereum blockchain, but it is unlikely that anyone will use it, and a hard -fork will have zero impact on post-Merge Ethereum.
Miners will move to Ethereum Classic or move on
This is not the first time Ethereum has been through a hard fork. In 2016, the events surrounding The DAO smart contract hack resulted in Ethereum’s first hard-fork and the creation of Ethereum Classic. This incident caused a massive philosophical civil war in the community over Ethereum’s founding principles, but in the end these principles were abandoned by pragmatism. Ethereum was hardforked to roll back the consequences of the hack, while those who followed Ethereum’s founding principles were left behind on the newly renamed “Ethereum Classic.“
A similar situation could unfold over The Merge, but instead of a philosophical debate about the fundamental principles of Ethereum, it is because some crypto miners did not prepare for an event that has been openly discussed (and even memed) for the past seven the years . There is not enough developer support or market demand for a Proof of Work fork of Ethereum, so miners will have no choice but to migrate to Ethereum Classic eventually. But with no reason for Web 3.0 or blockchain metaverse apps to build on Ethereum Classic, mining the ETC cryptocurrency may not be profitable either.
Ethereum was never intended to remain a Proof of Work blockchain secured by crypto mining. The Ethereum Foundation has planned to transition to Ethereum 2.0 front and center on Ethereum’s roadmap for its entire existence. Miners have had several years to prepare for this event, but it seems that some of them had not planned. It is unknown how many Ethereum miners will choose to move to Ethereum Classic versus how many will attempt to mine the forked blockchain, but forking Ethereum does not look like a promising option, and mining Ethereum Classic may or may not sustain their business models.
Source: CoinGape
