As Ethereum prepares to move from proof of work mining to proof of equity, thousands of ETH miners could be put on hold. Some miners quickly make adjustments and choose Aether Classic, then what will the supporters do between POS and POW? Comply with the new way to face a large amount of equipment update expenditure, adhere to the rules faced with being eliminated, another way out or collective hard fork?

As Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues to disrupt the lives of millions, many Ukrainians have turned to a reliable source of income that is relatively passive and requires little maintenance. For years, the Ethereum network relied on thousands of individuals like these Ukrainians to produce ETH through an energy-intensive process known as "mining," the original crypto fraud of blockchain. These people, known as "miners", use computer power to solve complex puzzles; The winners of these contests receive what are known as block prizes, or valuable ETH. Da Liang, head of Finance and business development at F2Pool, said: "Because of this war, we started offering zero mining fees to all Ukrainian miners, a leading service that allows individual Ethereum miners to pool their computing power and share profits. "We see a lot of individual miners in Ukraine living in villages and running several Gpus to support their entire families."

But those Ukrainians may soon have to find another way to pay their bills. The long-awaited "merger" of the Ethereum network will put an end to the practice of Ethereum mining. After several delays over the years, the merger formerly known as "Ethereum 2.0" began on September 19, after VGod claimed the test merger was 90% complete. Whether the merger can actually be completed remains to be seen.

The pools, and the miners who made them

As the merger nears, a rift is emerging in the Ethereum mining community between the companies that help coordinate the resources of individual miners (the mine pools) and the individual miners themselves. It has to do with the system that will soon replace Ethereum mining. Currently, miners can create new ETH by committing huge computing power (in a process called proof of work), while after the merger, network participants known as verifiers will be required to commit large amounts of pre-stored ETH to validate blocks, create more ETH and receive pledge rewards. According to the Ethereum Foundation, this process is called "proof of ownership" and would be a 99% more environmentally friendly way to generate new Ethereum. It will also reduce the issuance of new ETH and distribute incentives in smaller blocks.

For mining pools, the transition is not such a huge leap. The mining pool companies had never done the work of generating computer power themselves, so they never put money into mining hardware that was going to be obsolete. What these companies do have, however, is human capital: the infrastructure necessary to coordinate pools of resources, find new customers, and keep thousands of existing customers happy. For this reason, leading Ethereum mining pools are already transitioning to pledge pools: coordinating and combining the ETH of many individual pledges to create more organizations.

"Going from mining to Stakefish requires business development, customer service, communication with core developers, client teams, software, redundancy," says Daniel Hwang, protocol Director at Stakefish. Stakefish is the Stakeholder sibling of F2Pool, the second largest mining pool; Both companies have long been planning the transition from Ethereum mining to pledging, sharing and coordinating human resources for that purpose, and Hwang currently holds roles at both companies. EtherMine, the largest pool of Ethereum mines, is also transitioning to pledge: the company just launched a beta version of Ethereum Pledge, a pledge service.

EtherMine and f2pool together account for almost half of all the hash values or computing power currently used to mine ethereum, and companies like EtherMine and f2pool operate on a fee structure, charging individuals to participate in their pools of money. But the transition looks very different for the miners who make up these pools and other independent Ethereum miners. Who profit by mining the Ethereum personal - or through to mine pool of adequate professional computer power, or by independent monitoring large-scale mining hardware farm - now find themselves have what they don't need the resource (very expensive mining hardware to pledge to use), and the lack of a kind of they don't have the resources (human capital).

With the relatively seamless transition of the pool to pledge, what will become of individual miners?

"I don't think there's a lot of customer overlap," Da Liang said, referring to the lack of crossover he observed between new pile pool players and miners. Micah Zoltu, a core Ethereum developer, puts it more bluntly: "The demographics of hope provers are very different from those of miners." Zoltu sees the lack of hardware needed to participate in the pledge pool as a problem for those who have already purchased hardware, and an opportunity for those who have not: "Verification can be done on a home computer. You don't need specialized hardware."

EtherMine is optimistic, however, that it can bring current miners into the mix and take them all the way. The CMO of Bitfly (EtherMine's parent company) says their goal is to convert our current miners from certificates of employment to certificates of equity. Butta points out that most of the deposits on EtherMine's new pledge platform come from existing miners. "The merger is coming," says Da Liang. "I don't think they have much choice. They will just keep mining Ethereum until the merger."