The Ethereum network’s transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus has a likelihood of overflowing the crypto sector with out-of-work ETH miners, leading to severe disruption to all PoW tokens. 

Specifically, Andy Long, the Head of Bitcoin miner White Rock, reportedly shares a belief that the anticipating Ethereum Merge will be the driving factor for PoW miners to search for greener pastures, nominally other PoW blockchains, and hence “swamp” other coins – causing extra mining hardship and bringing down profitability. 

“As GPU miners point their hardware at other chains their difficulty will increase causing lower returns and splitting the reward amongst more miners.”

Long further noted that the migration will have the possibility of forcing many crypto miners to give up and abandon their high-cost mining rigs.

“Hashrate will flow to alternative GPU PoW coins, and many miners will simply give up and try to sell off their farms of cards. Some miners will try to sell their High-Performance Computing (HPC) or GPU cloud services and will likely fail since there’s too much capacity chasing a limited amount of demand,” he added. 

GPU prices and demand have already been experiencing a drop as an outcome of falling Bitcoin (BTC) prices, resulting in a few cards selling for under the list price and sellers finding it hard to offload their mining rigs and cards for inflated prices.

Despite of what may occur following the Merge, Long claims that he is “not strongly opposed” and is keen on seeing “how market forces play out.”

“When I was building GPU farms in 2017 the Merge was cited as an imminent threat and would have been much more impactful then. There will always be GPUs mining some GPU optimized chains, but I doubt we will return to the levels of revenue seen in ETH proof-of-work at its peak ever again.”

The expected timeline for Ethereum to finalize its transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism will fall between September 10-20 and is viewed as one of the most major upgrades in the crypto market in 2022.