Ethereum will stop mining soon - will video cards get cheaper?

At the end of July, at the World Blockchain Conference, Vitalik Buterin indicated the beginning of 2022 as a possible datemoving to the proof-of-stake protocol: validators will be responsible for conducting transactions, and miners will remain out of work. However, this does not stop either miners or hardware manufacturers.

The London hard fork took place on August 05, and on August 19Altair will be updated. According to the roadmap, these are the final steps before merging the two branches, codenamed Mergel. The difficulty bomb is slated for early December, but is likely to be pushed back to the first quarter of 2022.

Image Source:ethglobal.com

Over 90% of Ethereum mining comes fromvideo cards, however, in recent years there have been successes in the production of ASICs for the ethash algorithm. For example, at the beginning of this year, NVIDIA presented its first chip for ETH mining, which is capable of delivering 26 Mh / s with a power of 125 W. The availability of efficient devices has attracted institutional investors, for whom the payback periods in the Ethereum network were lower than in Bitcoin. So, according to Ethan Vera, executive director of the Luxor mining center, the payback of equipment in Ethereum comes in four months, and for Bitcoin - only in a year.

This circumstance prompted the mining companyincrease capacity despite the risks associated with PoS. In October 2020, Hive Blockchain became the largest public Ethereum miner with 3.4 Gh / s, and by the end of this year it plans to increase its capacity to 5.5 Gh / s. Hut 8 breathes in the back of her head, which has bought equipment from NVIDIA for $ 30 million, which will add 1.6 Gh / s of power this month.

Miners assume that the timing of the stageMergel will drag on - this happens regularly in Vitalik Buterin's network. Therefore, they do not want to miss out on the opportunity to earn money on the second largest cryptocurrency.

Image Source: Cryptocurrency ExchangeStormGain

ASIC manufacturers support miners inarms race. Bitmain, Innosilicon and iPollo announced the appearance of more advanced ASICs on Ethereum by the end of the year. The latter has already collected pre-orders for $ 200 million.

Most frequently asked question in the comments:when will video cards fall in price? The risk of abandoning proof-of-work does not stop companies from pursuing computing power. The last hope of gamers is associated with the development of ASICs capable of squeezing video cards out of mining. As the institutional demand is met, the complexity of computing will also grow, and the payback of mining on video cards will soon exceed a year. If ETH does not reach its all-time high by then, the demand for it from miners will decrease significantly.

 

Analytical group StormGain