#trading channel of interest.Are you a miner or interested in learning how to mine ETC? This page is for you.
The two main hardware categories that can be used to mine Ethereum Classic are GPUs and ASICs, and within each category there are many options. You can find a short guide about how to decide what to use in the mining hardware section.
Depending on your operating system, there are a number of options available. Check out the mining software to find the right tools for you. You also find video tutorials online by searching "How to mine Ethereum Classic".
Ethereum Classic's hashing algorithm is almost identical to ETHash, so it supports the same hardware, and mining ETC should be as simple switching to a mining pool that supports ETC.
As Ethereum Classic enjoys a large hashrate, it is very unlikely that a small solo miner will be lucky enough to mine a block on their own. For this reason, unless you have a large mining operation, solo miners usually join a mining pool to receive a smaller more regular rewards, proportional to the hashrate they contribute.
You can find a list of pools that support Ethereum Classic in the mining pools section, and metrics on the size of these pools in the network monitors section.
Look for a pool with low fees and one that's large enough to find blocks fairly regularly. You shouldn't necessarily want to join the largest pool, as balancing hashrate out between different pools helps keep Ethereum Classic decentralized.
Ethereum Classic is currently the largest GPU-minable cryptocurrency in terms of net revenue, with the largest total USD value of block rewards.
As with all cryptocurrency mining operations, whether or not your can make a profit depends on a number of factors, such as hardware efficiency and scale, but is largely determined by the cost of electricity in your local area.
Some users may decide to mine at a loss, as it enables them to acquire "fresh" ETC for transactions that do not have any provenance.
Ethereum Classic uses the ETCHash mining algorithm, a close cousin of Ethereum's ETHash, with a smaller DAG size. Hardware that was being used to mine pre-merge ETH can also be used to mine ETC.
Presently the main source of revenue for miners comes from the fixed base reward, as outlined in ECIP-1017. Every 5 million blocks, this reward is reduced by 20%, in a similar way to Bitcoin's halvening.
There are also 3 additional sources of revenue that miners should take into consideration when calculating profitability, which largely depend on network usage:
- Transaction Fees
- Uncle Rate
- MEV (Miner Extractable Value)
ETHash was originally designed to be memory-difficult, with the goal of making the use of ASICs (such as those designed for Bitcoin's SHA256 algorithm) non viable.
With time, it was realized that there is no such thing as ASIC resistance. Eventually all mining algorithms, if profitable, will create an incentive for chip designers to come up with optimizations for that specific algorithm, which happened for ETHash (and was inherited by ETCHash).
As of 2022, ASICs are available that can mine ETCHash 2x to 6x more energy efficiently than GPUs, and is likely that this trend will continue.
100%. Unlike many other projects, which have a % of block rewards going to a centralized treasury system, ETC remains fully neutral in this regard. In 2021 a treasury proposal like this was rejected by the ETC community.
Very unlikely at this point.
Before Ethereum switched to Proof of Stake, there was ongoing debate about ETC switching to SHA3, partly to defend from "The Flood" of latent hashrate that could be used to 51% attack the chain post-merge.
Since The Merge, far from being attacked, ETC has instead become the "apex predator" of the ETHash family of mining algorithms, making it far more difficult to 51% attack. Switching to a completely new SHA3 algorithm would sacrifice this secure position and is no longer being actively being debated.
While any change to Ethereum Classic is technically possible, a switch to Proof of Stake is practically untenable, as a consensus has formed around Proof of Work's superiority in terms of censorship resistance. Any proposal to introduce Proof of Stake on Ethereum Classic would at first be ridiculed, and if forced into the client code, would cause a chain split resulting in two chains. Whatever happens, there will be a version of Ethereum Classic that remained on Proof of Work, making attempts to implement PoS largely fruitless.
You can read more in the Proof of Work section.
Several miners compete to submit blocks to the blockchain. Inevitably some miners will lose the competition. The blockchain references the losing blocks to make the blockchain more secure. These losing blocks that contribute to the security of the blockchain are referred to as uncles. The term comes from the fact that blocks have preceding parent blocks. The losing blocks are not parents but are still related to the parents. Hence they are like uncles.
