The time remaining until the eagerly expected Merge on the Ethereum network is rapidly decreasing. The 15th of September has been set as the date. However, a faction of Ethereum’s skeptics, known as “displeased miners,” is planning to hardfork the network’s blockchain in protest. They’d like to keep employing the PoW consensus protocol since it ensures their continued relevance.
Goodbye Ethereum Miners
Despite this, the largest Ethereum mining pool, Ethermine, has opted to stop contributing to the expanding PoW consensus by ceasing all mining operations. The Ethereum network’s stratum nodes will be taken offline. So, miners’ equipment couldn’t join the Ethermine pool.
The Ethereum Ethermine pool, so the developers say, will soon be restricted to withdrawals only. This takes place when the switch to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) has been finalized.
In order to keep miners apprised of upcoming events, a calendar with relevant dates and times will be displayed on their individual dashboards. Unpaid funds can be cashed out after miners initiate a withdrawal from their dashboard. In order to receive a payout manually, the balance must be greater than 0.005 ETH.
ETH Proof-of-Work Advocates in the Office
Ethereum Proof-of-Work supporters have begun organizing materials for the creation of a competing consensus mechanism. The development team announced three major PoW version enhancements were ready for rollout on August 15.
The ETHW foundation has also released a technique for safeguarding assets known as “liquidity pool freezing.” Liquidity tokens, in their view, are a prime target for hackers who can wreak havoc on the community’s safety in this way. This leads the company to put a temporary hold on the release of certain tokens from the liquidity pool in order to ensure the safety of the users.
Due to the network’s efforts to lower its energy footprint, Ethereum mining is no longer viable. Because of this, numerous costly pieces of mining equipment are sitting idle, causing the workers to become irritated. After being left in the dust by the web, miners are now attempting to sabotage the move to PoS.
Miners want to do a hard fork of the network before the transition to PoS, however this is difficult due to Ethereum’s complexity.
Crypto Twitter Wars over Hardfork
Some members of the cryptocurrency community on Twitter have expressed confusion on the hard fork’s motivations since they don’t know which side to support.
Many people think that miners who support the hardfork are already reaping the rewards of it. While some find the incentives appealing, others point out that they aren’t enough to pay the ever-increasing price of mining hardware.
There hasn’t been enough of an increase in the price of ETH to allow miners to recoup their investments just yet. Moreover, they would incur losses if the price of Ethereum did not rise. And they would fall even more if they didn’t try to fork Ethereum.
Because the vast majority of crypto users are not miners, it is routine practice to neglect the mining community. Therefore, miners have decided to take a stand by forking Ethereum in an effort to preserve their livelihood.
However, the Ethereum miners found it difficult to implement the anticipated hard fork. It’ll be interesting to observe how people avoid being brought up as examples in the coming arguments.
