What do miners do after Ethereum switches to PoS?

Ex-miners of the Ethereum (ETH) cryptocurrency are mining altcoins and moving to cloud computing so that expensive equipment does not just stand idle, the Financial Times reports, citing industry representatives.

The publication found out that mining companies such as Hut 8 Mining and Hive Blockchain Technologies are already considering the possibility of using video cards to launch cloud services. However, it is unclear what kind of services they are talking about.

Chris Kiley, the head of marketing at Flexpool mining pool, said that several dozen graphics cards will heat real estate in Vancouver: «Now that it’s colder, I’m going to turn them back on… the graphics cards generate heat from the load, so it makes sense to just run the GPU rather than turn on the devices that heat the house.»

As the Financial Times found out, about 20% of miners do not intend to give up cryptocurrency mining. They have switched to such altcoins as ethereum classic (ETC), ravencoin (RVN), and ergo (ERG). However, it is still unclear how profitable it is to mine altcoins or provide cloud services compared to ETH mining. Others are waiting for the market to grow so that altcoin prices justify the costs of mining.

As a reminder, in mid-September, the Ethereum blockchain network switched from the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm to the more environmentally friendly Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

Classic PoW mining in Ethereum is now replaced by another method of mining coins — staking, and the Ethereum network will be protected by validators. The update also reduced the network’s power consumption.