ROI was never promised. Ethereum has always had a "Minimum Necessary Issuance" policy. Keeping issuance constant would be deviation from the policy, reducing it when possible is in line with the policy. From the docs:
> Ethereum's Monetary Policy is defined by the rewards that are paid out by the protocol at any given time. Ethereum's current yearly network issuance is approximately 4.5% with 2 Ether per block and an additional 1.75 Ether per uncle block (plus fees) being rewarded to miners.
> Ethereum does not have a fixed supply because a fixed supply would also require a fixed security budget for the Ethereum network. Rather than arbitrarily fix Ethereum's security, Ethereum's monetary policy is best described as "minimum issuance to secure the network".
> Ethereum has had a history of reducing issuance to these estimated minimums and the network has never increased issuance. The move to proof-of-stake is also part of Ethereum's effort to reduce issuance to minimum amounts without sacrificing security.
* It uses GPUs.
* ROI in terms of ethereum is basically irrelevant. Real ROI depends on the bouncy crazy chart.
* Was there not enough warning before the changes?
Many miners buy purpose built servers for crypto mining.
> Was there not enough warning before the changes?
That's the main plaint of the article, and reiterated multiple times. The article claims that the prices was dropped with 2 of the forks, each time it was promised (including at the very beginning) that changes would never be made. Each fork seemed to be of gain to the people who were part of the ICO, but at an income loss to miners. There were several broken promises of no further forks.
I didn't ask whether promises were eventually broken, I asked how long the warning was.
Also if we talk about the promises, I'm pretty sure proof of work was supposed to be dead years ago. The current state is more than promised.
> I'm pretty sure proof of work was supposed to be dead years ago. The current state is more than promised.
That's a fair point
I think it's fair that if you've purchased specialized mining equipment, you expect the ROI you were promised. Doesn't seem strange.
> Ethereum functions on proof-of-work and needs some people to sell their compute time and electricity
So compensation for work. If not 'workers', you could call them 'investors', or perhaps 'sole traders', or 'merchants', not sure what the best analogy would be. To be fair, I don't necessarily put them in the same class as people making socks in a sweat shop on slave wage. The down-trodden Ethereum miner is not someone I lose sleep about.