At the end of November - at the beginning of December 2020, a very important hard fork on block 11.700.000 called "The Thanos" will take place in the Ethereum Classic cryptocurrency network, which will accept ECIP 1099 changes. With the implementation of these changes, the Ethereum Classic cryptocurrency will change the mining algorithm from ETHash to ETCHash, i.e. after the hard fork in the era of 390 ASIC, miners for Ethereum will not be able to mine Ethereum Classiс, and the video cards will need to update the miners that will support the new algorithm.
One of the first miners with ETCHash support was Nanominer 1.12.0.
In addition to changing the mining algorithm, another important change is a decrease in the DAG file size from 4Gb to 2.74Gb, in other words, video cards with 3 and 4 Gb memory can return to ETC mining. After 4GB video cards will not be able to mine Ethereum in December 2020, according to the plans of the ETC team, all this volume of video cards should go from the ETH network to ETC, which should radically solve the problem with 51% attacks on the network. Now, we recall that the Ethereum Classic cryptocurrency network is subject to frequent attacks due to the fact that the network hashrate is quite low and the estimated cost of a 51% attack on the ETC network within 1 hour can be around 5000 USD.
Considering that Ethereum is the most popular cryptocurrency for mining on video cards and the bulk of the video cards involved in mining ETH is exactly 4GB (more than 50%), then December 2020 will be very interesting in terms of redistributing mining capacities in the amount of several million video cards with 4GB. And to what cryptocurrency all this freed-up volume of video cards will be transferred remains the main question, since this will automatically raise the popularity of this cryptocurrency, and, accordingly, the price for it. And the ETC hard fork expected in early December 2020 makes Etehreum Classic the main contender for this role.
