Editor's Note: This article comes fromZhikuang University (ID: gh_37c9e0eaf00a), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Zhikuang University (ID: gh_37c9e0eaf00a)
Zhikuang University (ID: gh_37c9e0eaf00a), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.On September 21, V God, the founder of Ethereum, reposted a tweet saying that he "sleep 7-8 hours a day", and a netizen replied: "No wonder Ethereum 2.0 has not arrived."
Thanks to the explosion of the DeFi market, Ethereum mining has become a favorite in the eyes of many people
Ethereum 2.0
, both the number of people entering the venue and the computing power of the entire network are growing rapidly. However, Ethereum 2.0 is like a sword of Damocles, because the PoS consensus mechanism does not require the Ethereum graphics card mining machine currently mining.
So, here comes the question, how long can the gold mountain of Ethereum be dug? After the transition to PoS, where will these Ethereum graphics card mining machines go?
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Ethereum 2.0
At the beginning of the birth of Ethereum in 2015, the development team made a development roadmap for Ethereum in the next few years, which are Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity. stage. Among them, the first three stages belong to the era of Ethereum 1.0, and the fourth stage "Tranquility" will allow Ethereum to slowly transition to the era of 2.0.
According to the currently announced roadmap, Ethereum 2.0 will include 3 stages:
Phase 0: PoS beacon chain
Phase 1: Data sharding, but excluding computing sharding (that is, the shard chain will "contain" data with a capacity of 2 MB/s, but the data are all dumb data objects, not transactions)
Phase 2: Transaction sharding (sharded transaction processing function)
The latest news is that on October 12, ConsenSys researcher and Ethereum 2.0 developer Ben Edgington issued a document saying that the creation of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain is expected to be realized within six weeks.
As for the recently popular rollup expansion technology, although V God, the co-founder of Ethereum, has repeatedly called on the community to pay attention to and use rollup, he wrote an article in detail at the beginning of this month, "If rollup is used as the future development center of Ethereum, Ethereum What adjustments should be made to the roadmap of Ethereum”, but he also said frankly that there is still a long way to go for the scalability of the Ethereum base layer, and it is likely that the blockchain base layer will not be realized after many years. expansion.
Ethereum 2.0 is technically more complex than 1.0, and each stage requires more time to develop, test, and update to go online. From the perspective of project volume, Ethereum 2.0 cannot be completed in a year or so. As for how long it will take, no one (including V God) can give a clear time point.
In addition, the current Ethereum carries a lot of funds, contract applications, and a lot of users. Every upgrade needs to take these into consideration. Therefore, the entire upgrade and migration process of Ethereum 2.0 will be very slow and cautious.
There was a joke on the Internet that was widely circulated in the circle before, saying:
If Ethereum 2.0 succeeds, the currency price will skyrocket, and the miners will pay back their capital in advance; if it fails, 1.0 will continue to mine. Regardless, miners are invincible.
Although this is a joke, it also shows that the safety cushion of Ethereum miners is very high.
Even if the Ethereum 2.0 of the PoS consensus mechanism is launched, the 1.0 chain will still exist for a long time, and there will be a transition period of "dual chains running simultaneously". Therefore, Ethereum miners need not worry now.
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At present, the main force of the Ethereum mining machine is the graphics card mining machine, which mainly relies on the GPU for mining. If it really comes to the stage where Ethereum 2.0 is online and running stably, and the possibility of block production due to the difficulty bomb of 1.0 is very small, these graphics card mining machines also have other places to go:
The first place to go is to mine other currencies. One of the advantages of graphics card mining machines is that there are many types of coins that can be mined, and many small mining currency project parties also welcome the addition of graphics card mining machines, because the more computing power added, the higher the cost of 51% attacks, and the block The security of the chain is also higher.
Not long ago, ETC (Ethereum Classic) had a series of 51% attacks, and had to reorganize blocks afterwards. Because of frequent 51% attacks, some exchanges have stopped ETC deposits, and some exchanges have increased the deposit arrival time to 10,000 block confirmations, which greatly affects user experience.
ETC and ETH were originally a family, and both used the Ethash algorithm. However, the computing power of ETC's entire network is less than 2% of that of ETH. At present, ETC has no plans to upgrade to the PoS consensus mechanism in the future, so after the Ethereum graphics card miners cannot mine ETH, it can be expected that a considerable part of the computing power will be used to mine ETC.
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The current computing power of the entire network of Ethereum is about 249.65TH/s. According to the average computing power of each graphics card mining machine of 300MH/s, there are about 800,000 graphics card mining machines in the entire network. Other small mining coins cannot fully accommodate so many mining machines and computing power at present, which will inevitably make some graphics card mining machines withdraw from the mining market.
summary
For graphics card mining machines that have withdrawn from the mining market, selling the residual value after dismantling is the second place to go. The general-purpose graphics cards that have been mined for two years have a residual value rate of about 30% of the market price of new graphics cards. These graphics cards can flow to the consumer market and be sold to gamers, image processing companies, etc.; , castrated off a lot of output interfaces and unnecessary functions) the residual value rate is very low.
Therefore, miners who are going to enter Ethereum mining now, it is best to choose a general-purpose graphics card.
