So I was talking to my buddy about this. When Ethereum ETH moves to POS this year.. where will you / everyone turn their miners? Will mining alt coins as a whole become significantly less profitable? What do you think and why?

All GPUs will be posted to eBay!

There is still much argument over whether ETH can actually switch to POS and stay viable and stay decentralized.
With the current proposal meaning that only those with a very large stake will be able to "mine" my staking - this means that the ETH network will go from millions of points of security to only hundreds or thousands.

I unsderstand the stated or ostensible reason for POS - that it wastes so much electricity and is bad environmentally, but the ETH dev team has to be able to convince everyone that POS will be better and convince them in a way that maintains the value of ETH. If they can't convince most people - as soon as they switch to POS you will see a huge dump in price.

I don't know many of the technical details but I don't see any other major successful coin out there that is running POS. Correct me if I'm wrong about that. There are a few little ones.

I think the real world situation is that Vitalek, etc would like to make ETH POS but ETH is way too big as a POW coin right now - if they just try to force POS they risk killing it. Will they take that risk?

What do you choose to focus on mining?

What are your thoughts on potential overflow or hash rate on other alt coins then?

Those are all some great points guys, so what is the next step for ETH - you think POS 2018 then or is POS truly an unrealistic dream

With all that hashing power dumped onto other Alts you think it has the potential to crash alt mining profitability as a whole or it will simply be a negative impact?

I don't think so , difficulty is rising due to large mass of new miners hitting the network everyday due to that 2x profitability right now , when the profitability returns to what it used to be before most of the new comers will sell thier rigs because they get in mining with false calculations , profitability will decrease because of difficulty rise or prices drops thats a fact.

i don't think so, some huge farm can't take on small coins, therefore those farm only will be forced to sell their gpu

I look at it this way:
Presently I see a minimum of 5% pool hashrate, a high of 45%, and an average of ~15-20% pool hashrate.
If the pool jump up several GH, my profitability gets cut down to a smaller fraction... lets say an average of 2-5% max.

If the pool gets 1.5BTC/mo;  and I am only seeing 5% vs the typical 15-20%;  I am taking a major profitability hit just by the numbers.
I take into count the algo's profitability/mo as well as the other common factors in choosing what to mine.

We all know (the ones whom have been at it for a while now) that when pool hashrate gets above a certain amount;  profitability can drop just because of network saturation (higher diff);  profit does not linearly scale with hashrate...  In a perfect worked it would, but that is not so in reality.
I see much better profits and the pools "run of luck" when the pool hash is lower, and I am a good percentage of that hashrate.

I'm hoping it gets delayed, but if not, I won't panic and sell my GPUs right away. Test out other coins and see what works, trade to BTC.

you could be correct.  But after I slept last night I thought about this post.

I checked all my money tied up in gear/coins/hashing contract with bitmain.

I decided I my ratios are wrong and I sold 2 coins for about 2450 usd.

I still have btc held  but my cash ratio is now more in line with what it should be.

I hold BTC
I hold ETH
I hold ZEC
I hold ZER   coins are worth 6k

I have  8k in gpu gear -------2.1k of this is off line due to arrive this week
I have  6k in asic 256 gear

I have 5k in cash            so all my crypto related stuff is about 25k

I have to keep ratios good.