{"id":4187,"date":"2017-12-04T10:28:54","date_gmt":"2017-12-04T18:28:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coincentral.com\/?p=4187"},"modified":"2021-09-30T16:48:03","modified_gmt":"2021-09-30T20:48:03","slug":"when-will-ethereum-mining-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coincentral.com\/when-will-ethereum-mining-end\/","title":{"rendered":"The End of Mining: Ethereum&#8217;s Move to Proof-of-Stake"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In August of this year (2017), Vitalik Buterin, creator of <a href=\"https:\/\/coincentral.com\/what-is-ethereum\/\">Ethereum<\/a>, released the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/ethereum\/research\/wiki\/Casper-Version-1-Implementation-Guide\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">implementation guide<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> for the first version of Casper. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As a hybrid proof-of-stake (PoS)\/proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm, Casper v1 is going to decrease (and eventually end) the profitability for <a href=\"https:\/\/coincentral.com\/is-ethereum-mining-profitable-worth-it\/\">Ethereum miners<\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The release date is estimated to be sometime in 2018 as part of the Constantinople hard fork and there\u2019s a lot to learn before this happens:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What is Casper?<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What is the &#8220;difficulty time bomb&#8221;?<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How does this affect miners?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What is Casper?<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Casper is a PoS algorithm that\u2019s projected to be released on the <a href=\"https:\/\/coincentral.com\/how-to-buy-ethereum\/\">Ethereum<\/a> network <strong>sometime in 2018<\/strong>. Beginning as a hybrid with the current PoW algorithm, the first version of Casper will only use a PoS consensus to validate every 100th block, called <strong>\u201ccheckpoints\u201d<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Once a checkpoint is validated, there\u2019s no way to go back and use a chain without it. Even if 99% of <a href=\"https:\/\/coincentral.com\/best-ethereum-mining-pool\/\">miners<\/a> support a chain that doesn\u2019t include a checkpoint block, all clients in the network will still continue to use the one with the checkpoints. <strong>This removes a lot of the power that miners currently have.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>The Ethereum community hypothesizes that the switch to PoS will help with the scaling issues that the network is currently facing.<\/strong> The algorithm should enable new blocks to be created more quickly while allowing the network to scale more efficiently through sharding. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Shard_(database_architecture)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Sharding<\/a> is a horizontal partitioning of a large database into smaller and more easily managed parts.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Beyond that, PoS algorithms also use less energy to run the network, reduce centralization, and make 51% attacks more difficult.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What is the &#8220;difficulty time bomb&#8221;?<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With the upcoming hard fork, there could potentially be three forks of Ethereum:<\/span><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereum PoS<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereum PoW<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ethereum Classic<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And, if you\u2019re a miner, you may be thinking, \u201cNo big deal, I\u2019ll just continue to mine and give support to the Ethereum PoW fork.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Not so fast. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Ethereum developers have stated that they\u2019ll be releasing what they call the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/ethereum\/EIPs\/pull\/669\/files\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">difficulty time bomb<\/a>\u201d on the PoW chain shortly after Casper is implemented. To put it simply, <strong>the difficulty time bomb increases the mining difficulty exponentially until the chain becomes impossible to mine<\/strong> &#8211; an event called the \u201cEthereum Ice Age\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Implementation of this strategy should prevent the creation of a third fork as support for the original PoW fork will just shift to the new PoS fork. The time bomb was originally planned to go off at the end of 2017 but has been pushed back by a year and a half. Right now, <strong>there&#8217;s not an exact estimate of when it&#8217;ll be released<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How does this affect miners?<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you\u2019re a miner, you may want to start looking for more profitable coins to mine. Even though a complete shift to a PoS algorithm is still a year or two away, it\u2019s clear that the <a href=\"https:\/\/coincentral.com\/how-to-buy-ethereum\/\">Ethereum<\/a> community is almost unanimous in this decision.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With block rewards decreasing from <a href=\"https:\/\/coincentral.com\/is-ethereum-mining-profitable-worth-it\/\">5 ETH to 3 ETH<\/a> and every 100th block soon being validated by PoS, you should check out mining other coins like <a href=\"https:\/\/coincentral.com\/what-is-monero\/\">Monero<\/a> or even <a href=\"https:\/\/coincentral.com\/ethereum-classic-vs-ethereum\/\">Ethereum Classic<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is this the beginning of the end for Ethereum mining? In this article, I explain the upcoming Ethereum changes and what effect they have on miners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":4347,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5714],"tags":[5774,5795],"class_list":{"0":"post-4187","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-articles","8":"tag-ethereum","9":"tag-investments"},"wppr_data":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>When will Ethereum mining end?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Is this the beginning of the end for Ethereum mining? 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