What to mine after the Ethereum merge?
With Ethereum moving from proof work to proof of stake this month many GPU miners may find themself in trouble. Not only miners can't mine what used to be their most profitable coin but also on the market their GPUs will probably lose a lot of value since the demand for GPUs will go down and a sudden supply will flood the market.
As we know most of the top crypto networks and protocols are being directly built with or switching to proof of stake models, and only a remaining few are still proof of work.
Why not mine Bitcoin? Bitcoin is proof of work, isn't it?
So yes Bitcoin is proof of work but it has a very different mining algorithm than the one employed in Ethereum which means to be profitable at BTC mining you will need more than GPU's hashrate. To mine BTC properly you will need an ASIC miner a machine that is only designed to mine Bitcoin and other coins closely related to the Bitcoin algorithm.
it's not profitable to mine BTC on GPUs even if you pool the hashrates together.
What to mine then?
A very efficient and easy tool you can use to see what you can mine with your specific GPU after the Ethereum merge is whattomine.com
This site will provide you with profit and energy consumption estimates per coin and per GPU.
Disclaimer: This is not a promotion or advertising for the website and it's not guaranteed that the data provided will be the same as your mining results. But it's a good tool to have to make projection estimations and forecasts.
Very important technical things to mention:
The current profit displayed for each coin on whattomine.com is the current profit with the current hashrate used on the mining network of this coin. After the merge, thousands of mining pools of those coins will be hammered by the sheer new inflow of hashrate that will be injected by the millions of GPUs that were used to power Ethereum. This will indeed cut their profitability substantially.
It's very hard to pick a new winner because there is nothing that currently would be able to absorb all the hashrate liberated.
Another alternative may be selling your hashrate to a third party.
There are websites that allow you to sell your hashrate like nicehash.com and hashmart.io and get paid in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
Disclaimer: This is not a promotion or advertising for these websites and you should know that cryptocurrencies and mining them carry the risk of loss and other factors.
It's definitely not clear what miners should do next, but a good plan would be to clean your GPUs and potentially improve your rigs. Waiting for a clearer picture two or three weeks after the merge and being ready to adapt quickly to the environment generated.
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