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Comment by Findeton | Hacker News Reader

These mining restrictions are... interesting, given that Ethereum is about to move towards staking rather soon anyway ..

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I’ve been hearing this - “moving towards stakes soon” - for at least a year now.

They have it running, and people are making money off of it. The difficulty now is social, convincing people to switch.

No, it’s commercial: convincing the miners to switch who obviously have a vested interest in perpetuating PoW

The miners don't need to switch; in fact, they can't. There's no mining on the PoS network. Miners will effectively have to stay on ETH1 or move to another cryptocurrency.

I think it's largely political, getting stake pool nodes and people using ETH2. There will likely be ETH1 and ETH2 running side by side for some time. ETH1 can be burned to get ETH2, so there's a one-way transition (though I'm not sure if this story is complete yet, that's the plan anyway).

I wonder if we will have a new wave of miners. If you want to get in, instead of spending $10,000 on mining gear, spend the same amount on coins which are easier to sell off later when you want to get out.

Staking income is much lower than mining. Eth 2.0 is targetting a 7% annual return, outside of any currency inflation. So there will be stakers, but it won't be the gold-rush of mining.

>soon

The earliest likely merge date is Q1 2022. The only exception is if the situation is urgent (miners attacking, or nicehash having a dangerously high percentage of hash) - in this situation the merge itself could be done in a month I think.

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