If you're wanting to mine Ethereum before the shift to staking occurs, here's how long it takes to mine one ETH.
Ethereum is the latest talk of the town considering the Ethereum merge date is drawing closer with each passing day. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had already stated that the ethereum 2.0 transactions per second will increase at a tremendous pace.
Furthermore, changes in the ethereum gas fee prices are also expected post the merge implementation.
Mining Ethereum is currently comparable to that of mining bitcoin, but given the environmental impact of mining, Vitalik Buterin and the wider Ethereum community are keen to move away from this towards staking.
So, here's what to expect from ETH mining.
How Long To Mine 1 Ethereum
One Ethereum - or 1 ETH - does not, theoretically, take long to mine. Ethereum has a block time of around 13 to 15 seconds, with each block rewarding 2 ETH.
However, this does not mean you will be able to earn 1 (or 2) ETH after 15 seconds of mining. In fact, mining Ethereum in 2022 means you are less likely to do so than ever before. This is due to the high level of Ethereum difficulty.
With more miners contributing more power to the network, Ethereum's difficulty has dramatically increased over the past year. The difficulty is currently at 11,832.596 ETH (as of July 27, 2022).
Essentially, with a higher difficulty, your mining profitability will decrease as you are less likely to be chosen for the next block.
If you created a mining rig with a 100MH/s hash rate, for example, it would take an estimated 403 days to mine 1 ETH - or its equivalent - according to CoinWarz. Even a whopping 2000MH/s, or 2 GH/s, farm would take around 20 days to mine 1 ETH.
Of course, most Ethereum miners don't set out to mine 1 ETH. Instead, they will seek smaller rewards earned as part of a mining pool.
Mining pools allow miners to band their power together, giving them a higher chance of success. The rewards earned are then distributed throughout the pool based on the proportion of power each miner contributes.
However, with Ethereum staking set to take over from mining pretty soon, this system is set to change.
In the latest ethereum news today, investors are a bit worried that they will not be able to mine ETH due to its transition from PoW to PoS.
The Ethereum merge date has also been declared, compelling the majority of investors to migrate to ETH classic mining to retain their mining habits and identities.
Ethereum Staking Time
Ethereum staking will be Ethereum's new method of validating transactions, set to be fully implemented with Ethereum 2.0's release. Using a proof-of-stake algorithm, users will no longer need expensive mining rigs, but will contribute ETH to be staked instead.
This will see users voluntarily 'lock up' their ETH in nodes for a period of time, of which these nodes will form part of the blocks.
As Eth2 is not yet out, we don't know how long exactly ETH will be locked up for during staking. Currently, any ETH staked on testnets will remain locked up until after the next stage of Ethereum 2.0 - the merge. This is slated to happen in Q3-Q4, 2022.
Ethereum is now one step closer to the Merge as it has recently activated the Sepolia Testnet merge on block number 1,450,409. Sepolia is the second testnet (there are three testnets in total) to merge it's PoW execution layers with PoS consensus layers before the final merge could be deployed sometime soon.
The ropsten merge had been conducted on June 8, followed by Sepolia on July 6. The next testnet Goerli will soon be deployed in about a month before the network adapts to the much-awaited Proof-Of-Stake consensus
In addition to this when Ethereum will transition towards the POS consensus, validators along with those participating in staking pools will be entitled to receive additional ETH coins as rewards.
Read More: London Hard Fork: What To Expect From EIP-1559
[Featured Photo by Executium on Unsplash]