Ethereum has been the talk of the town ever since the transition to Proof of Stake (PoS) was announced. The entire community has been keeping track of all the events leading up to the same. While the majority of the industry seemed to be anticipating a seamless transition, a few of them were hoping for another delay. However, it appears that everything has gone according to plan, and all that is left is for the PoS to launch.
The Ethereum PoW community said that a “hard fork is inevitable” back in mid-August, and that work was already being done to make the hard fork successful. According to information provided at the time, the community had already removed the difficulty time bomb, changed the Chain ID to give replay protection, and finished setting up the testnet, advancing the plans.
The team has now revealed the precise date of the fork’s formal introduction, which is the most recent development. The hard fork will happen one day after Ethereum’s Merge materializes, according to their most recent Twitter thread. Notably, the latter is scheduled for September 15, implying that the former would likely be launched on 16 September 2022.
The Ethereum PoW team tweeted to elaborate further on this,
“ETHW mainnet will happen within 24 hours after the Merge. The exact time will be announced 1 hour before launch with a countdown timer and everything including final code, binaries, config files, nodes info, RPC, explorer, etc. will be made public when the time’s up.”
Furthermore, the block height of the Merge block “plus” 2048 EMPTY blocks will be the starting point for the mainnet. As a result, the first block on ETHW that might include any transactions will be the Merge block + 2049.
The company also disclosed that the initial mining difficulty will not be less than ~220 T, which translates to 15 TH/s in terms of hashrate.
Ethereum miners to lose significance
Miners will become less important on the Ethereum network after the Merge. Ethereum miners made $1 billion more than Bitcoin miners did the previous year. The advantage held by Ethereum miners has persisted from this year to the present. However, by mid-September, the income figure is expected to decrease to zero. Colin Wu tweeted the precise numbers after tallying them up,
ETH miners earned 11 billion, 18 billion, and 2 billion in 2022, 2021, and 2020, compared to 10 billion, 17 billion, and 5 billion for BTC miners. Ethereum miners’ income will likely be reduced to 0 after this week.
