  On 15th September 2022, The Merge marked the Ethereum network's transition
from computation-hardness-based consensus (proof-of-work) to a committee-based
consensus mechanism (proof-of-stake). As a result, all the specialized hardware
and GPUs that were being used by miners ceased to be profitable in the main
Ethereum network. Miners were then left with the decision of how to re-purpose
their hardware. One such choice was to try and make a profit mining another
existing PoW system. In this study, we explore this choice by analyzing the
hashrate increase in the top PoW networks following the merge. Our findings
reveal that the peak increase in hashrate to other PoW networks following The
Merge represents an adoption of at least 41% of the hashrate that was present
in Ethereum, with 12% remaining more than 5 months later. Though we measure a
drastic decrease in profitability by almost an order of magnitude, the
continued presence of miners halts claims that power consumption was instantly
addressed by Ethereum's switch to PoS.
