El Go It is the event in which Ethereum will go to Proof of Stake and with this it is expected that one of its greatest concerns, electricity consumption, will be reduced to avoid regulations. Along with this, Ethereum miners were expected to liquidate their graphics cards and mining rigs, but this has not been the case because they have decided to switch to Ethereum Classic.
You are probably wondering what is the difference between Ethreum Classic and Ethereum. The second is what we know as the most popular and uses the acronym ETH, while the first is the result of a hard fork (a division of users from a certain point in the original blockchain) that uses the acronym ETC and that does not follow the orders or news applied to Ethereum. That is why Ethereum Classic has not switched to the Proof of Stake model and continues to use proof of work,.
They keep mining Ethereum, but now it's Ethereum Classic
The Ethereum Classic blockchain saw its hash rate rise to a record high on Thursday morning, shortly after the Ethereum Merge was completed. With this, Ethereum has switched to a user consensus method called proof-of-stake, which instead of using powerful computers, node operators they decide to put their cryptocurrencies at stake to win the opportunity to validate the transactions.
Ethereum Classic, traded as ETC, grew out of an ideological divide within the Ethereum community. In 2016, the Ethereum Foundation underwent a hard fork to reverse a major hack that affected $150 million of investor funds. The other version of the fork, which became Ethereum Classic, kept the hack to preserve the immutability proposed by blockchain technology.
Ethereum Classic also continues to practice the PoW method, attracting miners that mainstream Ethereum makes unnecessary. But it happens that the classic blockchain is much less popular than Ethereum. ETC is currently the seventeenth largest cryptocurrency, with a market capitalization of just $5.300 billion, while ETH is around $195.000 billion.
Miners are betting on ETC, which could negate the environmental benefits of the Merger. So it is possible that both the ecological and availability effects of GPUs will be negated by the efforts of the Ethereum Foundation. Of course, everything is based on profitability, and not being one of the primary blockchains, the profitability of mining to compensate for energy, maintenance and material purchase costs makes only be profitable for miners who already have large teams, not for new miners.
Source: Tech Crunch
