7 ms·
Demand for GPUs for Ethereum mining goes to zero in Q1/Q2 2022, when the beacon chain merges with mainnet. Quote: "This will mark the end of proof-of-work for E
by 37ef_ced3 5y ago
Demand for GPUs for Ethereum mining goes to zero in Q1/Q2 2022, when the beacon chain merges with mainnet. Quote: "This will mark the end of proof-of-work for Ethereum, and the full transition to proof-of-stake."
https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/merge/ https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/merge/
The price of (demand for) GPUs is strongly correlated with the market price of Ethereum. The Economist, June 2021:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/06/19/crypto-miners-are-probably-to-blame-for-the-graphics-chip-shortage https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/06/19/crypto-m...
Today, just like in 2018, we can see the price of Ethereum reflected in Nvidia's stock price. When Ethereum moves to proof-of-stake, mining GPUs will flood the market and demand for new GPUs will no longer be tied to the cryptocurrency bubble.
- AutumnCurtain 5y agoGuess I'll hold off on the new PC build a little longer.
- dncornholio 5y agoThese prices are becoming the norm, not the exception, already took too long.. I am slowly giving up hope a GPU will go for MRP ever again. I also just want my GPU man
- rbanffy 5y agoMy decision is to not care about games or heavy number crunching/ML training. This frees me from needing a dGPU. The added benefit is that my laptops get cheaper.
- zucker42 5y agoHas Ethereum ever met a roadmap deadline?
- 37ef_ced3 5y agoProof-of-stake was scheduled for December 2021, but it slipped to first-half 2022. Don't kid yourself, it won't slip forever. This is going to happen, soon.
- zucker42 5y agoIt's going to happen at some point, I agree, but I wouldn't count on it by mid-2022, which is important if you are looking to buy a GPU. The fact that my 1060 is valued at 150% it's launch price indicates that miners are also pessimistic about the speed of a full POS transition. Plus, I'm not convinced that the transition will go entirely smoothly. Obviously it would be in miners interest to prevent the POS transition, and if there's a bug or problems with the new chain I could totally see a fork or political pressure to delay things further (I don't think either is likely, simply possible).
- capableweb 5y agoHave you ever sought out to see which deadlines the Ethereum Foundation has setup and met? The only ones you'd read about online would be the ones that missed the deadline. But if you look at the previous milestones (like the Berlin upgrade), they all had their deadlines met correctly.
- cryptica 5y agoAre you telling us that one of the most popular cryptocurrency projects on the face of the planet which has access to thousands of the so-called 'brightest engineering minds' on the planet, after over 5 years, with billions of $ of funding at its disposal, has managed to make a minuscule change to its fee system? Wow, they're truly outdone themselves. What an exceptional team. I wonder how many Ethereum developers it takes to change a lightbulb...
- miracle2k 5y agoMany changes have been made, including a major upgrade to the fee system, with changes needing buy-in from many stakeholders. This is a network responsible for billions of dollars in value Or maybe it's monopoly money, but critics always like to have it both ways, don't they. It's real when poor victims are losing it, but fake otherwise. It's all pretend, except when something goes wrong, then the teams running it are suddenly irresponsible.
- cryptica 5y agoNothing ever goes wrong. A multi-million dollar hack is called a 'minor hiccup.' Missing a deadline by 5% of an entire lifetime is called 'a small delay' or 'a misunderstanding'. If they deliver within 10 generations, they will call it 'a resounding success, exceeding our wildest estimates.'
- capableweb 5y agoI think you vastly underestimate the difficulty on running a global network like that, with multiple parties who almost all have different goals and motivations. I thought HN was supposed to be better than that. Changing the tweet length on Twitter is hardly just changing the column limit, there is so much more work behind the scenes. At least with Ethereum you could (if you're interested, doesn't seem like you are) see all the changes they had to go through in order to get that change on the network.
- SilasX 5y agoHas Ethereum put every deadline on indefinite hold?
- TimJRobinson 5y agoIt's actually got a testnet running now, so it won't be long before the merge and switch to PoS happens.
- ohgodplsno 5y agoRight. Because the miners will stop their operations when Ethereum moves to proof of stake in 2030. Because there won't be a hard fork from miners who would rather have PoW. Because the miners will just give up on their operations when Ethereum isn't the shitcoin of the day. Because they won't move on to another shitcoin that is worth mining on GPUs.
- capableweb 5y ago> Because the miners will stop their operations when Ethereum moves to proof of stake in 2030 Well, from the perspective of Ethereum, they will, since Ethereum will no longer be PoW... > Because there won't be a hard fork from miners who would rather have PoW. There might be, or they might use Ethereum Classic. That's all fine, the second biggest network (Ethereum) will still be PoS so they can do whatever they want.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago> Well, from the perspective of Ethereum, they will, since Ethereum will no longer be PoW... Children develop object permanence by the age of two. How long does it take for cryptobros to develop GPU permanence ? You closing your eyes doesn't make the problem go away.
- capableweb 5y agoBut the GPUs already exists, what solution do you imagine that involves the said GPUs to not be used anymore? Even if you sell them to normal consumers, the GPUs will be used, one way or another. Are you suggesting we should destroy the GPUs that were previously used for Eth mining?
- gjulianm 5y agoI think the point is that the miners already have the GPUs, they will probably switch their operations to mining other coins/forks instead of just giving up on everything.
- 5y ago
- NelsonMinar 5y agoI'll believe it when I see it.
- Veliladon 5y agoThis. Ethereum already forked once. Ethereum GPU could remain its own currency for all of those miners who invested a shit ton of capital into GPU acquisition.
- somebodythere 5y agoIf the market value of Ethereum GPU is similar to the market value of ETC to ETH, the impact of Ethereum on the GPU market should shrink by 98%.
- rcxdude 5y agoIt could, but would it be worth anything? Miners only mine because they can sell the crypto to others for more than it cost to mine it. At current levels that would require quite a lot of buyers for this new coin with no significant advantages over the main branch.
- gbba 5y agoIt'd be worth less, but not entirely worthless. I think ETC is a good example of what happens on a deprecated branch.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mrfusion 5y agoHow come eth doesn’t use ASICS? Also when they switch to pos how do they transfer your coins over?
- TomVDB 5y agoEthereum mining performance relies on memory bandwidth. Designing a GDDR6 or GDDR6X memory controller is hard.
- TacticalCoder 5y ago> How come eth doesn’t use ASICS? Ethereum was conceived to be ASIC-resistant from day one. They even considered making the coin resistant to GPU-mining but then changed their mind. It's not that hard to be ASIC-resistant and seen that ETH GPU miners are still profitable to this date, they obviously succeeded in preventing ASICs from being economically doable to mine ETH. > Also when they switch to pos how do they transfer your coins over? Ethereum is already on PoS, but partially. At the moment mining is going on both chains: PoW and PoS. In a few months it's going to be PoS only. All the coins from the "old" PoW-only chain will still exist and be usable on the PoS-only chain.
- rbanffy 5y ago> They even considered making the coin resistant to GPU-mining This could have driven some very interesting developments in the CPU space, mostly in the memory interfaces.
- maxfurman 5y agoAnd the price of ETH is strongly correlated with the price of BTC. So we will see if those GPUs flood the market or simply switch to another crypto.
- Kathula 5y agoI'll doubt that'll ever happen. They've pushed up ETH 2.0 so many times that it's no longer believable.
- gh55 5y agoMore recently Vitalik has said Ethereum PoS is at least a couple of years away, likely due to new attack vectors that require further research https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10086 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10086, one of which enables an attack with only 0.09% of the total staked. It would have been foolish to fork knowing attacks like these are still being discovered. "with more than 99.6% probability, an adversary with 0.09% of total stake is in a position to execute a 1-reorg for any given day." Another which could prevent the chain moving forwards indefinitely. "an adversary controlling 15% of stake can stall PoS Ethereum"
- nostrademons 5y agoI heard June-ish 2022, which is a couple quarters away, not a couple years. Could potentially be delayed further, but 3 quarters doesn't seem unreasonable. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4345 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4345
- dannyw 5y agoThat's just a temporary delay, not when PoS would ship. The recently discovered attacks are pretty bad and the mitigations are band aids.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arnvald 5y agoIf people believed that this is the end of PoW the prices of GPUs would already be going down, because people would know that they have at most 7 months of run (until end of Q2) and that they'd be massive selling of graphic cards. I don't see it happening which means that either: * miners don't believe the switch is happening that soon * miners know they'll keep PoW with some other blockchain * miners are gambling hoping that they'll still make profit Maybe all 3?
- delaaxe 5y agoMaybe you don't realize the amount of profit that can still be made in those 7 months? Miners earn 2 ETH every 15 seconds.