With Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake from Proof of Work, mining won’t be required to mint new ETH tokens. This will make the mining rigs, which were until now profitable, useless. So, the question arises what will you as a miner do with those mining hardwares? are there cryptos you can still mine after Ethereum Merge? are you going to sell them? or are you going to pivot to other Proof of Work coins?
In this article, we will outline some alternate Proof of Work tokens that the miners can pivot to.
Ethereum Classic
Ethereum Classic has a Marketcap Rank of 22. It is essentially a hard fork of Ethereum (ETH) that launched in July 2016. Its main function is as a smart contract network, which fosters the development of decentralized applications (DApps) using Smart Contracts. ETC is the native currency of Ethereum Classic.
Since its launch, Ethereum Classic has sought to differentiate itself from Ethereum, with the two networks’ technical roadmap diverging farther with time.
Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Cash has a Marketcap Rank 32. It aims to become a peer-to-peer transaction system with a lower fee, and higher transaction speed. Bitcoin Cash developers hard-forked the Bitcoin code and modified it to build a network which is much cheaper and faster.
Similar to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash uses Proof of Work as it consensus mechanism. But due to its larger block size, the BCH network is faster and has lower transaction fees which make it a better option for everyday transactions. It also supports smart contracts.
Raven
Ravencoin’s Marketcap Rank is 89. It is a blockchain specifically created for the peer-to-peer transfer of assets. Although we can exchange assets over other blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, Ravencoin’s blockchain is built specificly for transactions which involve assets. Ravencoin enables you to create and trade any real-world (e.g., gold bars, land deeds) or digital (e.g., gaming items, software licenses) assets on a network with only that in mind.
Ravencoin is an open-source project which led by the core developers RavoncoinDev, Tron, and Chatturga. Bruce Fenton, Board Member of The Bitcoin Foundation, advises the team. The project garnered lot of attention when Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne made an announcement to make a multi-million dollar investment into the team.
Monero
Monero (XMR) Marketcap Rank is 30. Monero (XMR) facilitates anonymity and privacy during a transaction its a privacy-centric cryptocurrency based on the CryptoNote protocol. Monero uses a advanced cryptography to ensure that all of its transactions are 100% unlinkable and untraceable.
The project Monero is built on the forked code base of Bytecoin. With Bytecoin, the first real-life implementation of CryptoNote was launched.
Lite Coin
Litecoin Marketcap is ranked 24, it is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that is based on the Bitcoin protocol but differs in terms of the hashing algorithm, hard cap, and block transaction times. Litecoin has a block time of 2.5 minutes(Bitcoin takes 10 minutes) and a very low transaction fee making it the perfect candidate for POS transactions.
Litecoin was created by Charlie Lee a former Google employee and Director of Engineering at Coinbase.
Conclusion
In this article, we have tried to list down some of the well-known cryptos you can still mine after Ethereum Merge projects which use Proof of Work as their consensus mechanism.
In the future, they might very well follow suit similar to Ethereum which migrated to the Proof of Stake.