I made the mistake of getting into cloud mining Ethereum in earlier May. Partly out of excitement at what the smart contracts platform represents and partly due to FOMO.

2x increase in mining ETH

Over the past 1month+ the difficulty of mining ETH has increased significantly. Over this same period of time, BTC mining difficulty has gone up 27% - while this too is significant, it seems like peanuts.

source: coinwarz

Difficulty Bomb

In order to make Ethereum's move away from a proof of work consensus system to proof of stake, a difficulty bomb was introduced into the network in 2015 (if im not mistaken). This change introduced an *exponential increase in difficulty. As any exponential system, its impact had so far been minimally visible.

However, this has changed over the past month. Yes, there are more miners on the network now, but with each day, the impact of the difficulty bomb will become larger and larger and we are now fully in the grip of the ice age.

What it means

With implementation of Proof of Stake and as we move deeper into 2017, ETH will become harder to mine and slowly ... impossible even with more efficient hardware.

At this stage, the community will be faced with an important choice.

Another ETH Fork?

Miners would be forced to cease their effort and the only way to generate meaningful returns would be to stake your ETH to verify transactions and generate ETH. Needless, to say, all those GPU's dedicated to mining ETH would be rendered useless.

Miners could switch over to another altcoin like ETC, ZCash, LTC etc OR raise their middle fingers to the Ethereum Foundation and fork another version of ETH - one without a difficulty bomb

As a result, we may end up with three Ethereum Tokens

Etherem, Etherem Classic, EthereumGPUsMatter