Assuming ETH can pull off the switch to Casper and Proof Of Stake this year, what will happen?
To start its only 1 block out of 100 will be POS, but if I was a big miner I certainly would not want to be mining that 1 block. I would want to mine something else for that one block. I am wondering if that has been considered for the roll out? What if the ETH miners know when the POS block is coming and switch to ZEC for that block? The whole point of POS is to reduce electricity usage, so if you keep the miners in the dark when the POS block is happening you are not reducing electricity usage and even making the situation worse as now all that hash wattage IS truly wasted for one block and will reduce POW miner profits by 1%.
I have not dug into the finer details of the ETH Casper roll out, what do you think?
I don’t really know what is the real question you are asking. All the test phases of the PoS are not really important. What matters is what happens when ETH will switch to PoS with all transaction. How this will impact value of ETH? What will all those miners with tons of GPU do, will they switch to ZEC or other coins? I guess everyone will try to start mining other coins before considering selling the gear.
The main question is when this will happen. It was announced long ago, but I don’t really believe it will happen this year (but that’s just my opinion).
The 1 out of 100 is not a test phase, that is the initial roll out. They plan to slowly switch to POS from POW one block at a time. So Casper is a hybrid POS and POW at first.
Are the block times changing at all in POS? If not, one block on average is being generated every 15-16 seconds currently. What could big farms switch to and mine for those 16 seconds because of 1 block?
I think once you get into the 20-50% range of blocks being mined via POS is where miners may start to switch.
I did not know the block times for ETH were that short.
However, 15 seconds is a very very long time for a computer/miner to not be doing anything useful. The 2% dev fee most of us pay is worth thousands of dollars for the dev when spread out over many miners. So why do you think that 15sec mining for another coin is not worth thousands of dollars to a large mining farm?
At 15 sec block times there will be one POS block mined every 25 min. In a 24 hour period that is 57.6, 15 sec blocks, or 14.4 min of total mining time. For a large miner with say 2MSol/s (saw three around that size yesterday on Flypool, see below), that would be $233/day or ~$6,988 / Month (at todays difficulty). Clearly the tiny effort to switch to another coin for 15 sec is worth the effort to a large miner.
BTW: Those three miners are gone today. I did not get a screen shot of their history but those three were clearly testing software over the last few weeks. They were sporadically up and down.
Because on average it takes longer than 15 seconds to switch a miner to a different coin when you include ramp up time. I think the bigger question is can you move your farm to another coin and back within 15 seconds and mine something in that window to make it worthwhile? I think you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill.
I have a setup where it switches to whatever coin I want to mine with two mouse clicks once I have a config file in place. Even using my scripting to move coins it takes longer than 15 seconds. Sometimes it even requires a reboot depending on which algorithm you switch to and now we are at the point where we are now loosing money from trying to switch.
I still hold true to my original statement that it won’t affect miners till you start getting to the point where it will be more profitable to switch during those POS blocks where it will be at least 5-30 minutes for POS blocks. You have to consider how much time it takes to switch, possibly reboot, apply overclocks for the algorithm etc etc…once the POS blocks create enough of a window where miners have enough time to move to another algorithm and make profits, the. I believe your points are valid.
You are not trying to switch fast, so of course it does not happen fast. 15 seconds is not worth much to you and I, but to a miner with 2MSol/s its worth ~$7K a month in profit. If a miner does not switch, they waste 15 min of power every day (will be >$7K for ETH).
I think you are not considering the resources a 2MSol/s miner has available, and the financial motivation to switch fast. Making the switch in well under a second is easily achievable in hardware (at least in Linux, Windows is a different story for me, but also should be possible). Having a stratum pool up for multiple coins deals with the work already preloaded (which a big miner would already have). There are multiple ways to make the switch very fast.
I would agree with you some miners will just ignore the PoS block, but for others, those numbers are just too large to ignore.
Trust I hear what you’re saying, but until someone with that size farm comes into the thread and comments on their take, it’s all speculation at this point. It’s easy to calculate numbers, but making them a reality is a different world. I have 12 rigs all running Linux and have to reboot some if not all my rigs when switching between ZEC and ETH/ETC, so no amount of dev work is going to speed up POST.
This question might be best posed on an ETH forum and not a ZEC forum as you are more likely to get more replies there than here. In regards to difficulty, miners will deal with it like they do any other rise; add more gear or close up shop. I’ve already ROI’d on my farm and will ROI on any new purchases from a couple of days to a week or two. I plan on stacking my coins till the ETHocolypse happens and buy up all the cheap gpus that will be hitting the forums/eBay.
There will always be something to mine, may not be as profitable, but it will be there; people just need patience…
They predict that sooner or later they all will move to pos, because mining equipment is no longer self-supporting. While some huge players are still in the transition state, I “mine” cnx proof-of-stake. My profit is 12% plus some bonuses. I just transferred coins to a cryptonex desktop wallet and keep it online. I like this option as a long-term investment.
This thread just came back up, there was a new post. I reread your last reply and thought I would mention again, that changing coins can be done on the fly in the miner. There is no need to reboot. Claymore’s dual miner would be a good example showing this is possible, even though it is not implemented that way.
We do fast switching to change coins and jump in and out of pools when appropriate. This can be done with the closed DevFee mining software as well (not just custom mining software), just not as fast. For example: if you load two miners into a ramdrive (remember those). Then as long as the miners shut down properly you can switch between them very quickly without rebooting. The exception would be ETH and the requirement to load the DAG into GPU memory, will take a few seconds but still does not require rebooting. However, as shown by Claymore you can keep the DAG loaded in memory while mining another coin if you want (but that is custom at this point). I would expect Claymore and or Optiminer to eventually add these features. They both are exceptionally good coders and are always improving their product.
Yeah the numbers are large. The power usage of Bitcoin is currently estimated at ~20TWhrs, about the annual demand of Ireland. Ethereum is in a similar situation with annual 13.5TWh, with global mining revenue of $7.1B and a power cost of $1.6B.
I think the concerns that mining operations are unsustainable, and will consume too much world power by 2020 are probably unfounded. There is always a push for more green computer hardware, this will influence the cryptocurrency ecosystem and POW mining operations quite heavily. While POS and some 100% pre-mined DAG coins, (IOTA, NANO, and Byteball) claim to solve the power issues, it remains to be seen if a switch to POS will ever happen. However, DAG coins are very interesting with or without POW mining.
Having said that, there is merit to the argument that from 2000 to 2010 data center power consumption skyrocketed from 20TWh to 70TWh. At that growth rate it would outstrip global capacity by 2020. However, data center power usage has not grown significantly since 2010 and is on-track for a 45% reduction by 2020. This was accomplished by efficiency improvements in PSU, CPU, RAM, and HD technologies. There is no reason to assume the same will not happen to GPU technology driven mostly by AI but also crypto mining.
