ERGO, the future of mining?

Recently, I made a post asking the opinions of users here on what's going to be the next big mining coin: With ETH 2.0 in the horizon, what's going to be the next coin miners focus on? : CryptoCurrency (reddit.com)

Introducing ERGO:

ERGO ($ERG) was recently listed on Kucoin and just had a 34% move up today, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to present what it is, what it proposes and what problems it wants to solve in the crypto world.

From their whitepaper:

Ergo is designed for developing decentralized applications with the main focus of providing an efficient, secure and easy way to implement financial contracts.

Also, from their whitepaper, they say Ergo vision is:

• Decentralization first
• Created for regular people
• Platform for contractual money
• Long-term focus
• Permissionless and open

From Basics | Ergo (ergoplatform.org) :

Ergo’s primary focus is to provide an efficient and secure way to implement financial contracts, which are the most widely used application of blockchain technology.

ERGO is PoW and uses a self-developed consensus protocol called Autolykos. The reason ERGO uses PoW is explained as:

PoW was chosen for several reasons including that PoW protocols are widely studied, have high security guarantees, and are friendly to light clients. However, Autolykos has several meaningful differences from Bitcoin's PoW. It is memory-hard reducing the disparity between specialized hardware (ASICs) and commodity GPUs, allowing ordinary people to participate in mining to secure the network and receive the reward

So, you can see that there are measures in their protocol to combat ASIC only mining in the future, like what happened to Bitcoin.

Light clients:

One of the important properties of PoW is that it enables verification of the work done without downloading the full chain. Ergo blocks support NiPoPoW proofs, allowing light clients to synchronize with the network by downloading less than a megabyte of data. Also, Ergo uses authenticated state, and for any transaction included, a client may download proof of its correctness. Thus, regardless of the blockchain size, a regular user with a smart-phone can join the network and start using Ergo with the same security guarantees as a full node.

Ergo's use cases, as listed on their website ( Use Cases | Ergo (ergoplatform.org) ):

• Digital gold
• Powerful privacy applications
• Safe, simple financial contracts
• Alternative financial systems and products
• Experimental economics
• Money for hard times

So, this part isn't very exciting imo, ERGO is a project focused on added security and using well proven methods but nothing really differentiates them from other projects around, so why is it exciting?

ETH 2.0 is scheduled to come in 2022, and then ETH mining will die off and there are a lot of miners with GPU's in hand. Their options are either sell them all, most of them or keep mining some other coin. ERGO is designed as a PoW and it intends to stay that way forever, it's only logical that at least a decent percentage of these GPUs will be put to use. As I discussed on my other post linked at the start, there are other coins that might be the focus of this new mining rush such as ETC (sigh) or RVN, so these GPUs might be split into those as well.

For me, ERGO being ASIC resistant makes for a very appealing argument that it will be the coin mined by GPUs in the near future, more miners being mined bring more attention to the coin, more attention brings new exchange listings (No Binance, Coinbase or Kraken listing as of yet) and generally good things such as more network security.

Atm the network is sitting at 14.65TH/s and a 50 MH/s gives you a daily return of $1.75.

Dangers:

From Ergo's mining pool stats:

• nanopool: 9.57 TH/s
• herominers: 4.34 TH/s
• 2miners: 1.80 TH/s
• 666pool: 1.76 TH/s
• woolypooly: 1.43 TH/s

As you can see, too much of the mining power is in the hands of a few pools, so this is something to be aware of before investing as it can be a real problem, and if you decite to start mining ERG, choose a smaller pool. That's all, thanks for your attention