Ethereum Classic’s hash rate has gone up by about 25% of Ethereum’s hashrate, so at least for now it looks like a lot of the energy use is just moving as miners point their GPU rigs at alt coins. Very curious to see if ETHW, ie Ethereum without the merge, maintains a significant amount of hashing power. Another thing to watch will be if those alt coins are profitable to keep mining or if miners will start selling their rigs.
Aha, thank you! I felt like this change should be visible in some kind of graph somewhere, and you're right, the ETC hashrate has roughly quadrupled in the span of two days:
There will probably be some really interesting network effects with this. Since a lot of the other PoW coins that are ETH-hardware compatiable have low volume, I think we're going to very rapidly see the profitably of mining these go way down (to the point of going negative in some cases) as all these extra miners suddenly start mining these coins, but this takes time. So in other words, I would expect the real global energy usage reduction to happen weeks or months after the merge since it will take a while for all the altcoins to get overmined.
So, with all the new hashers coming from ETH, ETHW still has an order of magnitude less activity than ETH had before the change. Evidently it didn't absorb all the hardware.
The question if it is visible in the electricity generation numbers is still very relevant. (If it is, we will probably only be able to see it in an year, when international organizations compile their numbers.)
