Ethereum has announced specifications for Phase 1 of the Friendly Finality Gadget Casper (FFG Casper), a hybrid version of Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stack (PoS).
A final technical specification and also the most important parameter is the block reward. For Ethereum, the bonus reward will drop by 80%, from 3 ETH to 0.6 ETH each for Proofs of Workers.
"In the proposed specification for Casper's Phase 1, Ethereum will move from pure PoW to PoW / PoS hybrid version.
In this model, all PoW will continue to exist, but the bonus will be reduced in volume (0.6 ETH), but there will be additional evidence of PoS shares. "
This specification does not disclose the mass bonus for shares that each PoS miner can receive and we do not have the answers in this article.
So if the bonus reward is still 3 ETH, the reward rate for PoW miners is 0.6 and the PoS miner can be 2.4. However, still have to account for the cost of staking, so PoS miners can get less.
Vitalik Buterin also recently mentioned reducing the total bonus to 0.22 ETH per block after Casper's completion:
"At present, the expected value is 10 million ETH being staked at 5% interest, or ETH 500,000 per year (~ 0.22 ETH per block)."
There are several ways to improve Casper in stages, in the immediate future everything will start with FFG Casper's testnet.
More information about the roadmap is expected to be updated on April 6th in the Ethereum developer's weekly session.
Currently only 1 or 2 clients are implementing FFG Casper, most notably pyethereum.
Everything is in the "raw" testing phase until it is applied to the two main clients, Geth and Parity.
Once they have realized the FFG Casper, more and more tests will be launched. So we can only temporarily hope for the future of Ethereum, but perhaps the first quarter of 2019 will be the safest time.
Ethereum, of course, can speed things up when it comes to ASIC rumors, but Vitalik Buterin estimates the fastest is at the end of 2018.
We will have more ideas for the next few days, but the GPU and PoW miners should be ready to know that the rewards they receive will be greatly reduced.