It has finally come. The Ethereum merge over from POW to POS is set in stone and scheduled to take place in roughly two days. This merge on September 14th 2022 will make it so ETH is no longer minable and miners are worried. There are a few other POW coins currently that are next to ETH in profitability but one major problem. Nothing in this article is financial advise, DYOR.
Other POW Coins:
I spend at least an hour a day watching videos or reading articles about cryptocurrency. In the past year there have been a few coins that get mentioned more than others. I will list them below based on how often I have read / heard about them, along with some speculation. The other POW coins I have mainly been following are: ETC, ERGO, RVN coin and Firo. The daily issuance of all of these coins combined will not make up for the daily rewards ETH has been paying out. ETH currently pays out 8.43 ETH per minute, 506 ETH per hour and 12,145.30 ETH per day. With a current price of $1,694 per ETH that is $20,574,142 per day issued in rewards to miners. Before you go out and purchase more hardware, lets go over some facts. We have seen over the past week a huge increase on RVN price with a 75% jump in price.
ETC:
Ethereum classic is a very interesting one. This coin is the original fork of ETH after the 51% attack. We saw a peak earlier this year of around $140 per coin which quickly fell back down and is currently sitting around $39 per coin. Recently we haven't seem much price fluctuation on this coin. Unlike the other above mentioned coins, ETC will have many ASIC miners switch over once the merge takes place. This will happen because the algorithms are extremely similar and most ETH ASIC'S will be able to mine ETC, or already are able to, with a simple firmware updated.
ETC currently rewards 3.2 ETC per block with a block time of 12.97 seconds. This would mean 11.47 ETC per minute, 688.36 ETC per hour and 16,520.58 ETC per day. With an average price of $39 ETC is paying out $644,302.85 per day in rewards. This means that if ETC were to payout the same as ETH currently the coin would have to 31.9324088 or 32x. This would make the price of 1 ETC $1,248.
ERGO:
ERGO is an excellent choice for GPU miners, especially on AMD cards. The Autolykos algorithm uses significantly less power. This means the operating costs are lower and GPU temps are lower. You will save money on the cost to cool your rigs, weather that be external fans, air conditioning or even lower fan speeds on the GPU itself while maintaining you equipment in a healthier state. During the bull run we saw the coin price spike up to a staggering $17.83 but it slowly declined back to a now $4.44 per coin. We saw a nice 2x in price when compared to prices last month, which is a good sign for POW coins as everything else continues to fall.
ERGO currently rewards 48 ERG per block at a time of 2 minutes 23 seconds. This means there is about 20.13 ERG per minute, 1,208.39 per hour and 29,001.39 per day. With the current price of $4.44 per coin this would mean daily rewards distributed to miners would be valued at $128,766.21 per day. The coin would have to 160x in order to make up for all the lost profits from ETH moving to POS. This would value each coin at $709.41.
FLUX:
Flux is another POW coin with its own interesting tokenomics. Most notably the idea of parallel assets. These parallel assets are Flux tokens on other blockchains, there will be a total of 10 and 3 so far have launched. Without going into too much detail, these parallel assets essentially earn you interest. Flux also came out with different nodes you can launch to do the same thing.
Flux currently rewards 37.5 flux per block with a block time of 2 minutes and 1 second. This means that 18.59 flux is rewarded per minute, 1,115.7 per hour and 26,776.86 per day. At a current price of $1.21 per flux, we would be seeing $32,400 per day in rewards issued to miners.
RVN:
The main takeaway for Ravencoin, when it comes to mining, is the algorithm. The KawPow algorithm has been know for its ASIC resistance, giving GPU miners the blockchain.
RVN coin currently rewards 2,500 RVN per block with a block time of 59 seconds. This would mean 2,542.37 per minute, 152,542.37 per hour and 3,661,016 per day. With a currrent price of $0.065134 per coin thats $238,456 rewarded per day. This would make RVN coin the 2nd highest paying coin when compared to the others mentioned above.
Speculation:
A majority of GPU miners on YouTube have or are planning on switching over to ERGO. With the block rewards being reasonable and the daily payout not being massive there isn't much room for other miners to switch. The other 2 options I would consider would be ETC or RVN. ETC would be easiest as it has the most support when compared to these other coins, but will have the ASIC miners massive pool of hashrate switch over along with them. RVN coin has the 2nd highest daily issuance but uses more power, and will wear out your hardware faster. There's also the downside of how many coins, even after the halving, get issued per day. With limited exchange support and a huge pool of coins it will be hard for this coin to see a significant price increase.
