Questions:

Open Analytics (OA) bounties are bounties without specific prompts, just a direction and a reward. It’s your chance to have your brain follow your heart — got a spark of interest, or a loose thread, or a weirdly-specific question gnawing at the back of your mind? Follow it as far as you can!

Result and discussion:

• after merge a large number of miners (4860) have been lunched. Considering that no fee is payed to this miners perhaps this miners have been lunched by Ethereum itself.
• All active miner before merge have been turned off. as pointed above this because of no fee was payed to miners.
• after merge there is few miners that handle majority transaction.

Introduction:

Crypto mining is the process of verifying transactions on a blockchain network and being rewarded with new coins. What does crypto mining mean in terms of its blockchain functionality? Let’s find out.

What is crypto mining?

Crypto mining is fundamental to proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains like Bitcoin (BTC) as it provides the cryptocurrency network with security. To verify transactions and create new blocks, crypto miners solve complex puzzles and add transactions to a distributed ledger. For that, they are rewarded with new coins.

The term crypto mining was inspired by gold mining. Digital tokens are designed to be scarce. One of  their modes of issuance is via crypto mining. Similarly to gold miners who spend time and effort to obtain the precious metal, cryptocurrency miners are required to work hard and use electricity to power the process of crypto creation. 

Key points

• Crypto mining is an incentivised process whereby miners are rewarded with newly minted coins for verifying and processing transactions.
• Crypto mining is fundamental to proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin (BTC).
• A majority of crypto miners focus on mining bitcoin because it is the most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalisation. 
• Crypto mining is not always profitable due to intense competition, expensive mining equipment and high electricity prices.

Crypto mining explained: Proof-of-work

It's crucial to grasp the basics of the PoW consensus mechanism to fully understand the definition of crypto mining.  

PoW networks like Bitcoin are designed to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. These transactions are verified, finalised, bundled into blocks and added to the public ledger in order to keep transactions transparent and irreversible.

In a PoW consensus mechanism, miners spend time and computational power solving complex mathematical puzzles to verify and finalise transactions. Without miners, the cryptocurrency network could be exploited by users falsifying transactions, leading to “double spending”.

Miners are incentivised to secure the network by earning rewards of newly minted cryptocurrencies. Crypto miners also receive transaction fees in addition to block rewards.

How to become a crypto miner?

What is required to become a crypto miner? The minimum tools needed to start mining cryptocurrencies are:

• Mining rig 
• Electricity supply
• Mining equipment - ventilation, energy monitoring, electrical wiring

The majority of crypto miners primarily focus on mining bitcoin. BTC was the first PoW cryptocurrency and is the most valuable crypto, as of October 2022. 

Other PoW cryptocurrencies include dogecoin (DOGE), litecoin (LTC), ethereum classic (ETC), monero (XMR) and bitcoin cash (BCH).

Ethereum (ETH) operated as a PoW network until September 2022, when it completed The Merge, transitioning to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. PoS does not require miners to secure its network.

Types of crypto mining

According to Bitcoin.org, cryptocurrency mining has two forms: 

Solo mining

Solo mining is exactly what it sounds like: an individual mining cryptocurrencies and generating new blocks on their own. 

The payments are relatively large because the solo miner receives the entirety of the block reward. However, solo crypto mining may come at a higher variance, where the wait time between payments is longer than usual due to competition among miners.

Pooled mining

Pooled mining is a type of crypto mining where a miner pools resources with other miners in order to create blocks at a higher frequency than with solo mining.

Here, the block reward is shared among the mining team. According to Bitcoin.org, the proportion of rewards received by an individual miner in a mining pool is roughly correlated to the amount of hashing power contributed by that individual.

Pros and cons of crypto mining

What are the pros and cons of crypto mining? Let’s take a look:

Pros

• Proof-of-work, which uses crypto miners to secure their network, is considered the most secure consensus mechanism. Attackers attempting to control more than 50% of the computational power in a PoW network would require an enormous amount of expensive mining equipment and electricity to succeed.
• A surge in cryptocurrency prices will largely benefit cryptocurrency miners who receive coins as rewards for securing the network.
• Crypto miners have a range of PoW cryptocurrencies to choose from.
• Crypto miners do not have to stake their cryptocurrencies in order to participate in mining and therefore are not subject to penalties like slashing.

Cons

• The biggest criticism of cryptocurrency mining is its extensive use of electricity, which can be damaging for the environment. According to the Columbia Climate School, bitcoin mining consumes an estimated 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, which is more than the power consumption of Argentina.
• Due to crypto mining’s power consumption and pollution problems, the sector has become a target of regulatory scrutiny.
• Crypto mining is not always profitable. Intense competition among miners, expensive mining rigs and sporadic power supply can make crypto mining unprofitable, especially during crypto bear markets.
• Certain crypto mining rigs are very expensive. Bitmain’s Bitcoin Miner S19 Pro+ Hyd, which can be used to mine BTC, BCH, and BSV, is priced at over $15,000, as of October 2022.
• Crypto miners are also vulnerable if a network chooses to transition to a PoS consensus mechanism. In September 2022, Ethereum ditched PoW to operate as a PoS chain thereby making Ethereum miners redundant.

✍️ Description of Work

In this dashboard, we want to analyze Miners in ETH ecosystem. For this, we check the following:

• Number of new miners
• Number of transactions made by the top 30 miners before September 2020 VS transactions made by other miners
• Number of transactions made by the top 30 miners before September 2020 VS transactions made by other miners (normalized)
• Transactions done by miners before September and new miners after September
• Transactions done by miners before September and new miners after September(normalize)
• Number of new miners after September
• Transaction's number done by top miners after 1 September (Bar, donate chart)
• Transaction's number done by top 12 new miners
• Transaction number done by top 12 new miners (percent)
• Gas used done by top 12 new miners
• Gas used done by top 12 new miners (percent)

✅ Observations

At the beginning of the ETH ecosystem, the number of new miners quickly increases up to 300!

But after a short period of time, the number of miners decreases significantly and has no significant fluctuation over time

But after the emergence of the "merge" in the ETH network, the number of new miners is increasing rapidly and significantly!

The "merge" happened on September 6th, but the big swing in the "number of new miners" happened on September 15th.

🧠 Methodology:

1. for this analysis block table have been used.
2. for better illustration normalize figures have been used.
3. every analysis consist of before and after merge.

References:

flipsidecrypto.com

app.flipsidecrypto.com

✅ Observations

• after merge a large number of miners (4860) have been lunched. Considering that no fee is payed to this miners perhaps this miners

✅ Observations

• As you can see, more than ==80%== of the transactions in the ETH ecosystem are made by the top ==30== miners (More than ==900k== transactions), that's an important point!
• This charts shows the cessation of activity of the "Top ==30== Miners on ETH" after the merge!
• It's not just about the top ==30== miners! All the old miners on the ETH network have also been eliminated by the merge!
• After the merge, the mining process will continue through the emergence of new miners.

100%== of the transactions which done by the old miners were stopped after the "merge"!

All miners shut down on September ==15th== and new miners started their activity on September ==16th==.

✅ Observations

Number of new miners after ==15== September is ==4860

Transaction's number done by top miners after ==15== September has been visualized. based on this charts

• ==25.1%== of total transactions number after “Merge” belong to the “0xdafea492d9c6733ae3d56b7ed1adb60692c98bc5” with more than ==13.89M== transactions!

• ==11.7%== of total transactions number after “Merge” belong to the “0x388c818ca8b9251b393131c08a736a67ccb19297” with more than ==6.62M== transactions!

• ==10.6%== of total transactions number after “Merge” belong to the “0x4675c7e5baafbffbca748158becba61ef3b0a263” with more than ==6M== transactions!

What is The Merge?

The Merge upgrade is Ethereum's long-awaited migration from its current "Proof-of-Work" consensus mechanism to a "Proof-of-Stake" system. The Merge actually happens in a two-step process, which have been named the Bellatrix & Paris upgrades. The Merge was officially kicked off by Bellatrix, which took place on Sept 6th 2022 at 11:34:47am UTC. Bellatrix is a network upgrade on the consensus layer. Bellatrix will be followed up by Paris, which will be the execution layer that will transition Ethereum from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Paris will be triggered by a specific Total Difficulty threshold, called the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD), which makes the exact date of Paris TBD since it depends heavily on the proof-of-work hash rate. TTD is the total difficulty threshold required of the final block mined in Ethereum. In other words, TTD represents the fixed number of hashes that are left to mine until Proof-of-Stake officially takes over.

What happens immediately after The Merge?

Once complete, the already-running Beacon Chain will take over the process of validating new transactions through Proof-of-Stake and Ethereum's legacy Proof-of-Work model will be shelved permanently. To date, validators have already staked over 13 million ETH on the Beacon Chain. As the mainnet (the main network of the Ethereum blockchain) is merged with the Beacon Chain, the full transaction history of Ethereum, including every transaction, smart contract, and balance since July 2015, will also be merged.

Why is The Merge important?

The Merge is six years in the making and is considered by many to be a milestone in the history of cryptocurrency due to the potential material and philosophical implications. This milestone could also bolster market confidence and inject some much-needed optimism, after months of market volatility due to, among other factors, inflation and rising interest rates. As one commentator put it, Ethereum's Merge "will prove that a decentralized and permissionless network can operate in an energy-efficient manner." In addition, a merge like this is an incredibly rare event in crypto, and may never happen again.

How will The Merge impact me and my ETH?

The short answer is not much. The Merge is expected to be and should be seamless from a user's perspective. Coinbase will briefly pause some deposits and withdrawals as a precautionary measure, specifically new Ethereum (ETH), ERC-20, Polygon (MATIC), Optimism (OP), PWETH, PUSDC, and PMATIC tokens, but we otherwise do not expect any other networks or currencies to be impacted. However, for those who staked their ETH, balances will not be unlocked nor will they be available to trade or transfer immediately after The Merge. Staked ETH is expected to be unlocked and accessible once the Ethereum protocol completes its upgrades. Current estimates on this upgrade completion is early 2023. Stay tuned!