The Ethereum developers claim it is the final chapter of Proof-of-Work (PoW). But for some reason the imminent Ethereum Merge is being postponed once again.
Miners who have been panicking about the infamous switch of Ethereum to Proof-of-Stake (POS) in June 2022 can sit back and relax.
The Ethereum 2.0 upgrade that will see the network switch to PoS will come ‘in the few months after’ June, according to developers.
So it is the latter half of 2022 now, huh?
Miners who count every week of mining to get profits from the mining hardware can feel a little relief. For many of them ‘a few months’ might mean thousands of dollars of income.
What happened to Ethereum Merge once again and what should miners expect in the near future?
Ethereum Merge is postponed once again
“It won’t be June, but likely in a few months after,” Tim Beiko, an Ethereum Foundation developer, said on Twitter. “No firm date yet, but we’re definitely in the final chapter of PoW on Ethereum.”
We have heard a lot about the ‘last chapter’ recently. Ethereum developers are trying to be as clear as possible when talking about mining. It is doomed, they repeat.
This case is no exception. Earlier in the Twitter thread, Beiko had urged a user not to invest in any more mining equipment. According to him, that would be a waste of money.
What is going on with Ethereum Merge?
The march towards the Ethereum upgrade is often described as one step forward and two steps back.
Ethereum Merge was announced back in 2020. Next day one of the Ethereum Foundation researchers publicly doubted the Merge would happen that year. And he was immediately severely attacked by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin himself.
But as it turned out, the poor guy was right. We saw no Merge in 2020.
Later we were promised to see the Merge by the end of 2021. That never happened either.
In January 2022 Buterin and others were pretty clear about the Ethereum Merge happening by the end of the year.
In March developers began testing the impact of the Ethereum Merge on a “shadow fork” of the mainnet. That is considered the very last stage of testing before the actual Merge.
But as of now, the new testing environment has revealed bugs varying from sync code to request timeout.
If there is no Merge, miners are happy
Ethereum 2.0 – or whatever they call it – will change the way the second most popular cryptocurrency and its blockchain work.
While PoW requires mining and heavily depends on electricity, PoS is much more energy efficient. It will lay rest to concerns about how much energy is consumed by network validators.
What is more important to millions of miners around the world is that there will be no need in their work.
Ethereum mining will soon become obsolete. If you are a miner you will have an obvious choice either to sell your hardware (probably at extremely low prices because nobody would want it anymore) or to keep mining alternative tokens (which are much less profitable).
Sources: Decrypt
