The 110 millionth ETH was just mined while social engagement around Ethereum has exploded

By Selena On Mar 8, 2020

Currently, ETH is still using the POW algorithm, so you can still mine Ether. Previously, along with Bitcoin, Ethereum miners were quite profitable. However, with the fierce competition of large mining pools, equipped with modern Ethereum miners, ETH mining has not brought too much profit.

The 110 millionth #ETH was just mined!https://t.co/0viezi8bQz pic.twitter.com/2TpP1detVg

— AZCoin News (@azcoinnews) March 8, 2020

Even so, the 110 millionth ETH was just mined!

This is a significant event because Ethereum is transitioning to Proof-of-Stake. Since then, the validators of transactions on the network are no longer miners but validators that hold large amounts of ETH. Ethereum has no total supply limit like Bitcoin. Therefore, before this event, many questions were posed. For example, people still wonder about any clue about the max amount of ETH?

The 110 millionth ETH was just mined! from r/ethereum

Besides, there are still some who wonder what does that matter at all when ASICs have been allowed to attack the network? Or, what good is ETH if it’s mined by particular interest explicitly called out by the whitepaper? This is a significant milestone, but we need to take a long and hard look at this community after reaching it.

In short, people still do not believe that the 110 million ETH has been mined. And the question of how many ETH in total will be mined is still repeated. There is some suggestion that the number will be 120M until the IceAge and shift to Proof-of-Stake.

The high levels of engagement around the Ethereum community related to two focal points

Social engagement around Ethereum has exploded, with strong price performance and discussion around ProgPoW fueling the surge. According to the company LunarCRUSH, there have been some spikes in social engagement over the past week. These include favorites, likes, comments, replies, reruns, quotes, sharing, and other metrics. By analyzing this data, LunarCRUSH has recorded that ETH has more than 45 million participants on the first day of this month. Even more than 57 million social interactions 24 hours later, an increase of 27%.

ETHEREUM is Coin of the Day. Get real-time social activity insights for the next 24 hours at https://t.co/tZiLuSWnXE

…and if you create a free https://t.co/8DsA0NFOWp account, you’ll get social insights on all of your favorite coins.$eth #ethereum pic.twitter.com/lbLMVp7jLU

— LunarCRUSH Social Listening for Crypto (@LunarCRUSH) March 6, 2020

The high levels of engagement around the Ethereum community appear to be related to two focal points.

Ethereum’s social engagement | Source: LunarCRUSH

First, the price of Ether has increased by more than 20% since the end of February, far ahead of many leading cryptocurrencies. Therefore, discussing the price increase from analysts and cryptocurrency enthusiasts is a natural reaction. For example, derivatives trader Sawcruhteez said that if the support of $ 232 continues to hold, Ether could resume its uptrend.

Source: TradingView

The second and most crucial discussion point revolves around the changing controversial mining algorithm ProgPoW.

Community tensions around ProgPoW

The Ethereum Foundation defines ProgPoW as a proof algorithm designed to bridge the sufficient gap between ASIC and consumer computer hardware. This proposed change to Ethereum’s hashing algorithm plans to use almost every piece of commodity hardware (GPU) and is pre-tuned for the most common hardware used on the network.

Proponents, like algorithmic co-author Kristy-Leigh Minehan, believe that Ethereum should remain GPU-friendly. Minehan explained that she would like to see a network where a broad range of devices can mine. Easy access to mining represents a great way to onboard new people into the community.

.@ethereum #AllCoreDevs starting in 15min. This week, only two topics on the agenda:

1. Crypto Precompile: do we go forward with EIP-1962? an EIP for only the Eth2 deposit contract curve? Something else? https://t.co/Jcvk82ycm8

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) March 6, 2020

Meanwhile, those opposed to the system upgrade are concerned about its compatibility with existing applications and its potential security implications online. Some of them even argue that moving forward with a hard fork could create another chain split, similar to what happened in July 2016 with Ethereum Classic.

Despite their differences of opinion, both sides agree that changing the protocol is not worth the risk of network splitting. It remains to be seen whether the upgrade will find its way into an upcoming hard fork.

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