I haven't read enough to know the answer, figure someone here might have a better understanding. Was hoping the article would answer it, but it doesn't really.
Everyone doesn't have to agree. There will be miners that attempt a fork to keep their position. There is nothing wrong with this, it's how this stuff is supposed to work. But the fact that PoS has been on the roadmap since the beginning takes away legitimacy from any claim that the PoS transition is illegitimate. The fact that Ethereum Classic exists and is a PoW version of ethereum and intends to stay that way will take that even further. There will probably continue to be forks of ethereum, just like there have always been. Anyone can fork an open source codebase and maintain it, anyone can use the software to spin up a consensus network, anyone can use prior state as a starting point. Chain forks are a social thing not a technical thing, game theory not withstanding, that's how nakamoto consensus and FOSS is supposed to work.
It's the community - people who decide which "fork" to follow.
The real mechanism is that all the major players can’t accept two forks and maintain sanity. For example, Circle will have to choose which chain has a $1 peg for their USDC reserves, and they will certainly choose the chain supported by the core devs and the one the rest of the major players are selecting as well.
That leaves the rebel chain in a very compromised position. With the peg being removed many defi protocols would be in an exploitable state. Removing all those abandoned and compromised services ends up with little reason for anyone to use the chain.
To be honest, I still suspect someone will try. But it will be a mess and there will be lots of financial loss for users.
Users will have funds on both chains, they can just wait it out.
Firstly emergent consensus is a big part of decentralized systems. Core providers convening on a decision and supporting it is perfectly healthy. That’s quite different than a CEO saying things will be X way and everyone just having to accept it.
Additionally, my point is that people WILL likely try to have a contentious chain (as is their right in a decentralized project), but due to the maturity of Ethereum the technical consequences are much more impactful than the BTC/BCH scenario.
More decentra-lies and Ethereum pumping each other's, VCs and investors bags.
But there is a strong incentive to transition to PoS because it seems that the majority of stakeholders and participants in the Ethereum ecosystem agree with the upcoming switch to PoS.
It feels unlikely that miners won’t find something to mine.
If any miner is dedicated to ethereum for some reason, I expect that they saved some of their block rewards to begin staking, and the smart ones are likely already staking on the beacon chain.
I am willing to bet money that after ETH POS transition, graphics boards prices will crater.
> I am willing to bet money that after ETH POS transition, graphics boards prices will crater.
I really hope so. It's just such a shame that board makers made mining specific boards without display outputs. What a waste for the secondary market.
If my understanding of the crypto economics is right, no. The token price drives the mining effort, not the other way around. People buy these tokens because other people are willing to trade at that price, not because of the mining power within. Having more hash power does nothing for me as an owner of a token. The auto-scaling of the difficulty level is there to make attacks more expensive as the token value increases, it maintains the cost/benefit balance out of whack for any attacker. Only difference is slightly longer block mining time. Overall, nothing a normal user would feel.
Some people claim the other way, but I think they simply misunderstand the incentives. There was news that the Kazakstan crackdown led to the Bitcoin slump at some point, but that is, IMO, wrong, and they mistook some other events as causation. (in the same period, the stock market was also down).
GPU mining will still be a thing, but there simply will not be enough value to go around and the mining will crater until profits will be sustainable again. Extra mining gear will be sold. I maintain my prediction, and am really willing to put money where my mouth is.
I checked whattomine a few days ago and compared the hash rates of each coin. To make it simpler to compare, I converted it into RTX3080 equivalents. With this measure the hash rate for Ethereum was equivalent to mining with a bit shy of 10 million RTX3080s.
Ethereum Classic, which is the second biggest coin listed on whattomine, had a hash rate equivalent to about 263000 RTX3080s. I.e. Ethereum has 37 times more miners than Classic, and if they all moved to Classic the revenue would be slashed to 1/38 of what it is now while everybody would incur the same costs as now.
Ravencoin is the second biggest mineable coin (Monero isn't profitable to mine even now, so it does not matter) and Ethereum is 83 times bigger than Ravencoin.
It turns out Ethereum is more than 16 times bigger than every other coin listed on whattomine combined.
The current fork of eth is programmed to kill itself sometime next year. This means even if miners want to continue mining they must prepare and propogate their own forked software. There is no "do nothing" default option.
With this safeguard in place, to change the roadmap, they need to gain support of users at large, by getting them to actively switch to their fork, just as the roadmap supporters need to do.
Therefore, supporters of change and statis are on equal footing, ensuring that the system isn't biased toward stasis even when the roadmap calls for change.
To summarize, the difficulty bomb encodes the roadmap's plan to implement a change in the protocol, into the protocol, graduating the plan from having mere social consensus, which requires active participation to enforce, to having a technical one, which is autonomously enforced.
Hence: the very definition of a fork, that is some blocks seen as valid by some faction and seen as invalid by others.
The remaining fork seems to have considerably less activity now.
Everyone doesn't have to agree, just the exchanges. If the rebel chain isn't listed on exchanges then it's effectively worth zero and it will wither away.
Unless the value never really was tied to the energy use in the first place, which isn't a great story for folks who want to treat the coins as anything other than speculative assets.
As many mentioned here, you need to disable the Difficulty Bomb. But it is not the bigger problem actually, maybe it's even the simplest one.
What you also need:
- Organized community. I.e., some places to communicate. That's not easy. And be aware of ETH-maximalists that will come to trash it.
- Wallet that works out of the box. Not that Metamask, which is the most popular wallet in ETH, will never agree to support fork like it never agreed to support ETC.
- Block Explorer. People need to see their balance, check transaction status, exchanges need to point to that explorer as proof, etc.
- Miners would risk losing all their money if the chain eventually fails. Most miners are not so invested.
- Replay Protections to separate balances in forks. That's not easy. I mean, we have EIP-155, which was proposed by Ethereum Foundation, but it ensures that EIP-155 kind of replay protection would hurt forks because all of the software would need to be fixed for it. I.e., it's not a solution "out of the box", not user friendly.
- Exchanges. Maybe not so hard now. But without proper Replay Protection in place, some exchanges would lose their funds and would actively fight new forks to avoid liability.
- Public API endpoint. Like Infura. Because nobody runs its own node.
"Decentralization" in crypto is a myth.
Anyone is free to make a fork of any chain that does whatever they like. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting anyone else to care.
That economic activity consists of all the smart contract/web3/whatever you want to call startups that are currently building solutions based on the main Ethereum network and the investors/traders/opportunists backing them by speculating on the value of their coins/NFTs/etc or the value of their solutions.
Most of those companies will probably benefit from the improved scalability and reduced cost associated with POS; or even require it to be viable at all. At least I would expect this to be true for the ones with some ambition to actually deliver working products; which are probably also the ones with the most investor backing. Of course, many more serious applications switched to alternate blockchains because of the scaling issues with POW might now consider switching back. And additionally, improved scale associated with POS might bring some new companies with investors as well. So, I would advice people to just follow the money when speculating on the future value of any fork.
I suspect that won't stop anyone from creating that fork and you should actually anticipate multiple parties doing this and claiming to be the one true fork with varying degrees of credibility to trick people into buying some of their forked ETH. That's just how pump and dumps work and there are plenty of opportunists active to make that happen. And of course a fork means there are plenty of people not interested in the fork that would end up selling their forked eth so they can buy some more actual eth. Lots of people selling and not a lot of people with a good reason to buy means forked eth is not going to be worth a lot. Miners are going to run whatever has the highest yield. That probably is not going to be a forked Ethereum. Probably it's more lucrative to switch to some other POW blockchain (doge, bitcoin, etc.) if you have any serious amount of hardware.
Disclaimer: I don't hold any Eth and am not really into crypto investing. Ironically, that makes me a more reliable source of information because I have no stake in this game.
There won't really be much reason for people to use 1.0 to execute smart contracts*. There really isn't much for miners to do besides eventually cashing out and becoming a validator. Eventually when "the merge happens" Eth 1.0 will be automatically converted to 2.0. This won't be for a few years (but PoS will launch this year)
*The 1.0 network supposedly uses 1000x times the energy of the 2.0 one to execute a smart contract and would obviously be more expensive to work with, so people will probably avoid using 1.0 as soon as possible. Less use means lower gas fees means lower payouts for miners, who already had payouts reduced by EIP 1559, and will likely have payouts reduced once more. So miners will see a slow death.
Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken.
Anyone can fork the code at any time and keep mining. Many have. ETC and ELLA are a couple examples. Ethereum Genysys is a recent project in response to the PoS move.
ETH 2.0 was always just a series of upgrades. “The merge” which will end PoW mining is expected to go live between March 30th and June sometime at the latest. Code is expected to be complete in February sometime. Testing is well underway already.