Ethereum’s transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism has left Indian cryptocurrency miners worried. This is because all the GPUs that are being used to currently mine Ethereum will be useless as the Ethereum blockchain comes closer to The Merge.
“What happens to our GPUs?” asks 23-year-old Pawan Hegde, a Mumbai-based crypto miner who only mines Ethereum on his NVIDIA and AMD graphic cards. “This is a matter of concern, after all, it is a $19 billion question,” he says.
Some miners are also looking out for other business options that require computation power and put an end to the crypto mining business. “While we could mine other tokens like Ethereum classic (another Ethereum token that will continue to work on PoW) but the major concern is the profitability will go down by 10 times,” Pardeep Narwal, founder of New Edge Soft Sol, an IaaS firm based out of Rohtak told indianexpress.com.
The major concern that miners raise is that PoS is not fully decentralized. “Anyone willing to stake (put their cryptos in a pool) will have the power to verify transactions now,” Narwal added.
Another crypto miner, Jyotirmay Ray, argues that while the “profitability will decrease but so will the energy consumption”. He believes that “cards (GPUs) required to run mining operations will never be useless.” He adds that he will now move to mine other coins like Argo, Pearl, and Ethereum Classic. “Nothing beats Ethereum, but there is no doubt that PoS will affect the crypto mining industry and only the future will decide our fate.”
