Ethereum’s transition to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, thousands of Ether miners found themselves without a token to mine.
Ethereum’s cryptocurrency community of over 260 thousand wallets is now forced to either jump ship to other tokens – or completely abandon cryptocurrency mining altogether.
The transition also impacts the GPU market. Proof-of-Stake disincentives the widespread sales of GPUs.
Cryptocurrency mining takes a huge chunk of GPU sales. About 25% of all graphics cards today are used to mine cryptocurrency.
For that reason – the prices for this type of computer hardware are impacted by the cryptocurrency market.
When cryptocurrencies are booming – like it was around mid-2021 when Bitcoin reached nearly the value of US$70,000 – graphics card prices also surge in comparison.
However, when the market enter the so-called “crypto winter” earlier this year, GPU prices also began to decrease.
With major cryptocurrencies moving away from the traditional mining proof-of-work consensus in order to approach a cleaner and potentially faster method of token staking – miners are beginning to wonder if the business will be profitable in the future.
Reddit has various communities for cryptocurrency mining enthusiasts, gathering around 400 thousand users among them.
Ether Miners Having Difficulty Transitioning to Another Token
Despite reports that miners would transition to a forked Ethereum token, most of the community is wondering if the move is worth the risk.
However, a couple of days after the merge, only 4.2% of former Ether miners transitioned to ETHPoW.
20.9% have gone to “Ethereum Classic” – and nearly 60% of the miners are currently idle, or mining other cryptocurrencies.
“I was hopeful that the coins I was mining might be a little undamaged by the ETH refugees, so I did give it an extra couple of days to be sure,” Reddit user u/AJRimmer1971 posted on the r/CryptoMining subreddit. “My rig was returning around USD$3.40 – $4.50 per day, depending on the algorithm.
Yesterday, it struggled to make 40c in the same 24h window, on the same setting as the day before, which returned about $3.70.”
Well-known Ethereum mining advocate, Chandler Guo is also not optimistic about the future of cryptocurrency mining.
On Friday, the cryptocurrency miner told Coindesk TV that he believes that the vast majority of miners will have no long-term future in this industry.
“Some people have free electricity and can [continue] to work on that,” Guo said, referring to Ethereum’s fork token. “The other 90%,[will go] bankrupt.”
