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https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ This is coming and you will soon have any GPU want on ebay for nothing. Inb4 s

https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ This is coming and you will soon have any GPU want on ebay for nothing. Inb4 someone tells me they will just mine something else. Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin. https://i.imgur.com/TBouXrK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/TBouXrK.jpg That is a list of coins to mine sorted by exchange volume.

MisterSandman 5y ago
What's up with the weird pretentious verbage in that webpage? "Beacon Chain"? "Mainnet"? "The Docking"? Are they just exaggerated PR verbs, or am I just too old for this?
- ehsankia 5y ago
  Hell, the fancy sci-fi illustration and UX design give much more of a "tech startup" feel than a serious monetary alternative.
  - reasonabl_human 5y ago
    Ethereum wasn’t designed to be a money alternative.. it’s a distributed virtual machine that incentivizes computational contribution with token economics… the token Eth is only valuable in the pursuit of performing work via the Ethereum Virtual Machine on the Mainnet, not as a currency (at least, not any more than beanie babies could once have been a currency due to demand / fungibility) very much a global tech startup!
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  You don't have to be old to be ignorant. "Mainnet," and "Chain," have non-arbitrary, universal meaning in the distributed ledger space. 'Beacon' is not arbitrary either as it fits the function it names. I'm not going to sit here and defend Ethereum - but to answer you question: most of that verbage has meaning independent of Ethereum's PR.
  - MisterSandman 5y ago
    Fair enough, thanks!
    - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      Rare grace on the internet! Bless.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  I know can you believe software companies are using words like Windows (they belong on a house!), mouse (it’s a rodent!) and keyboard (it’s on a piano!).
- vmception 5y ago
  > Are they just exaggerated PR verbs, or am I just too old for this? False dilemma. They are proper nouns. Beacon chain is simply the name of the network launched a bit over a year ago. It is likely intended to be named as an aspirational thing to move toward. Mainnet is the network launched 7 years ago. Usually distinct from "test networks", testnet, and seen far beyond ethereum into all cryptocurrency networks, and inherited from the idea of test, development, staging and production environments seen in the best practices of all web projects in the broader tech sector. This is an article about them merging. What is "weird pretentious verbiage" about that? If there was anything odd it would be "the docking" and that article immediately says that was a former name, making it a moot point.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  "Mainnet" is a well established technical term, universal across the blockchain space. The chain names (e.g. "Beacon") are basically version codenames - think of them like the "Buster" in "Debian Buster". "The Merge" is the (arbitrary) name they gave to a specific future event, because people like to be able to easily refer to things they're talking about. I assume the previous name was discarded due to political correctness.
  - andybak 5y ago
    > I assume the previous name was discarded due to political correctness. Curious but it's hard to Google this. What was it?
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
      The previous term, docking - I'm sure either Wikipedia or Urban Dictionary will explain in detail, but it can be a reference to a sex act.
pxeger1 5y ago
> Inb4 someone tells me they will just mine something else. Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin. Devil's advocate: won't a fork of Ethereum which keeps PoW be able to do exactly that? (for example, Ethereum Classic?)
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  The market cap of ETC is much lower so if you have all that hash on it they sell their coins, no one wants to buy ETC nearly as much as Ethereum and poof goes the price.
omni 5y ago
This has been "coming" for years, I'm sick of seeing the Ethereum community use it as a way to whitewash their wasteful PoW excess. You and everyone else should stop even talking about it until it's shipped.
- vmception 5y ago
  > It is important to note that an implementation goal of The Merge is simplicity in order to expedite the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Developers are focusing their efforts on this transition, and minimizing additional features that could delay this goal. This is the exact forum to discuss this. I can't wait till your kind of vitriol has no legs to stand on.
  - omni 5y ago
    It's okay, that time is "coming" (will never arrive)
    - vmception 5y ago
      I guess this puts me in an interesting spot where I'm both A) content with the progress given the existence of the beacon chain B) don't care if the merge is delayed again, delayed indefinitely, or Proof of Work never gets turned off for some reason so although its tempting to get defensive I guess my real response is "okay? I don't care."
      - TheDudeMan 5y ago
        Doesn't it seem like PoW is a bad use of our limited electricity resources?
        kragen 5y ago
        Electricity resources aren't limited; electricity gets cheaper when you install more solar panels, not more expensive. That will continue to be the case for the next three orders of magnitude of marketed energy consumption growth.
Casteil 5y ago
It may help, but "any GPU on ebay for nothing"? Don't hold your breath...
jotm 5y ago
I really hope so, since I'm thinking of building a new computer for years now... Intel is releasing their own graphics cards, which is neat. It's a good time to enter the market, for sure.
mdoms 5y ago
Cryptocurrency propaganda.
dataangel 5y ago
> Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin. You fundamentally misunderstand how mining works. Difficulty automatically increases if blocks are being mined at faster than the expected rate. Needing more GPUs to mine the same number of coins raises the price.
- jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  > Needing more GPUs to mine the same number of coins raises the price. Ridiculous. Price is determined by how much people are willing to buy or sell it at, which they decide based on speculation. The amount of GPUs that will be put to the task of mining is dependent on price. Not the other way around. I could create an alt coin that requires some arbitrarily large number of hashes to mine a single block and receive 1 coin as reward. Yet I cannot command a higher price for it, because no one wants to buy my coin.
  - dataangel 5y ago
    Miners will only sell at prices that cover their costs. Yes you need demand too, but it's a question of equilibrium. If demand is high, price will go up, attracting more miners. But if the cost of energy/gpus goes up, miners won't be willing to sell for the same price as before, which will also increase the price.
- CyberDildonics 5y ago
  You have two things very wrong here. First, you are ignoring that difficulty adjustments can happen downward too. Second, you flipped the actually dynamic - the price swings dictate how much mining ends up being profitable, not the other way around. You might have also confused the difficulty adjustments with the reward decreasing over time.
  - dataangel 5y ago
    No I meant difficulty adjustment and I know they can also adjust now. What's being missed here is that price go up because of buyer AND seller behavior. The dynamic goes both ways. If there is a demand increase, price goes up, so miners mine more. But if costs for miners go up, they won't sell for less than their costs, so that also causes the price to go up.
randomsilence 5y ago
Old numbers, but the trend was stable [1]: >Simple division yields an estimate of 13.982 million GPUs mining Ethereum on April 16 2021. >40 million graphic cards produced in 2020 It's just 1/3 of one year's production that could be freed if people don't move to other coins. Is that enough to crush the market? [1] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-many-gpus-are-in-the-world-just-sitting-there-mining-crypto-all-day/ https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-...
- loonster 5y ago
  Need to also know the average lifespan of GPU in mining. If it is 1year, that would effectively increase capacity by 50%.
  - traceddd 5y ago
    Depends greatly on the conditions of the facility they were mining in. Heat kills these units. A professional set-up (not to be confused with a large one) will have much more mild impact on the units than a building with poor thermal considerations. Then again, high end miners will be running custom firmware which could also compromise the card lifespan.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  As a point of reference, the network hashrate has nearly doubled since then, i.e. in under a year.
  - ColonelPhantom 5y ago
    How much of that is attributed to GPUs? Do ASICs or FPGAs have any significant marketshare in ETH mining?
    - traceddd 5y ago
      Hard to say the number because it is difficult (but sometimes not impossible) to deduce the device from on chain data. ASICs do exist but they have not obsoleted GPUs like has happened on other projects (such as Bitcoin.) FPGAs were never big for mining. There was like 3 months in early Bitcoin where they people seriously tried deploying them but the simple fact is they are way too expensive from manufacturer markup for mining. And if you want to make your own you’ll just end up making an ASIC instead.
judge2020 5y ago
You can blame miners but it's just extremely high demand for these cards - once the merge happens and GPUs stop being super profitable, we'll see that not much has changed in terms of availability - and 40 series cards[0] will be just as hard to get. The only change might be a temporary drop in second-hand prices as the mining GPUs flood eBay for a month. 0: https://twitter.com/greymon55/status/1418795735802425349?s=20&t=0BXfU-VCy75A_F4EbOGVZQ https://twitter.com/greymon55/status/1418795735802425349?s=2...
abandonliberty 5y ago
Mining rewards and the price of a coin are mostly separate. Coins wouldn't crash, but rewards would be spread across more miners, reducing mining profits per hash rate.
freyr 5y ago
Perpetually right around the corner.

MisterSandman 5y ago

What's up with the weird pretentious verbage in that webpage? "Beacon Chain"? "Mainnet"? "The Docking"? Are they just exaggerated PR verbs, or am I just too old for this?

ehsankia 5y ago
Hell, the fancy sci-fi illustration and UX design give much more of a "tech startup" feel than a serious monetary alternative.
- reasonabl_human 5y ago
  Ethereum wasn’t designed to be a money alternative.. it’s a distributed virtual machine that incentivizes computational contribution with token economics… the token Eth is only valuable in the pursuit of performing work via the Ethereum Virtual Machine on the Mainnet, not as a currency (at least, not any more than beanie babies could once have been a currency due to demand / fungibility) very much a global tech startup!
mattwilsonn888 5y ago
You don't have to be old to be ignorant. "Mainnet," and "Chain," have non-arbitrary, universal meaning in the distributed ledger space. 'Beacon' is not arbitrary either as it fits the function it names. I'm not going to sit here and defend Ethereum - but to answer you question: most of that verbage has meaning independent of Ethereum's PR.
- MisterSandman 5y ago
  Fair enough, thanks!
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    Rare grace on the internet! Bless.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
I know can you believe software companies are using words like Windows (they belong on a house!), mouse (it’s a rodent!) and keyboard (it’s on a piano!).
vmception 5y ago
> Are they just exaggerated PR verbs, or am I just too old for this? False dilemma. They are proper nouns. Beacon chain is simply the name of the network launched a bit over a year ago. It is likely intended to be named as an aspirational thing to move toward. Mainnet is the network launched 7 years ago. Usually distinct from "test networks", testnet, and seen far beyond ethereum into all cryptocurrency networks, and inherited from the idea of test, development, staging and production environments seen in the best practices of all web projects in the broader tech sector. This is an article about them merging. What is "weird pretentious verbiage" about that? If there was anything odd it would be "the docking" and that article immediately says that was a former name, making it a moot point.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
"Mainnet" is a well established technical term, universal across the blockchain space. The chain names (e.g. "Beacon") are basically version codenames - think of them like the "Buster" in "Debian Buster". "The Merge" is the (arbitrary) name they gave to a specific future event, because people like to be able to easily refer to things they're talking about. I assume the previous name was discarded due to political correctness.
- andybak 5y ago
  > I assume the previous name was discarded due to political correctness. Curious but it's hard to Google this. What was it?
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    The previous term, docking - I'm sure either Wikipedia or Urban Dictionary will explain in detail, but it can be a reference to a sex act.

pxeger1 5y ago

> Inb4 someone tells me they will just mine something else. Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin. Devil's advocate: won't a fork of Ethereum which keeps PoW be able to do exactly that? (for example, Ethereum Classic?)

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
The market cap of ETC is much lower so if you have all that hash on it they sell their coins, no one wants to buy ETC nearly as much as Ethereum and poof goes the price.

omni 5y ago

This has been "coming" for years, I'm sick of seeing the Ethereum community use it as a way to whitewash their wasteful PoW excess. You and everyone else should stop even talking about it until it's shipped.

vmception 5y ago
> It is important to note that an implementation goal of The Merge is simplicity in order to expedite the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Developers are focusing their efforts on this transition, and minimizing additional features that could delay this goal. This is the exact forum to discuss this. I can't wait till your kind of vitriol has no legs to stand on.
- omni 5y ago
  It's okay, that time is "coming" (will never arrive)
  - vmception 5y ago
    I guess this puts me in an interesting spot where I'm both A) content with the progress given the existence of the beacon chain B) don't care if the merge is delayed again, delayed indefinitely, or Proof of Work never gets turned off for some reason so although its tempting to get defensive I guess my real response is "okay? I don't care."
    - TheDudeMan 5y ago
      Doesn't it seem like PoW is a bad use of our limited electricity resources?
      - kragen 5y ago
        Electricity resources aren't limited; electricity gets cheaper when you install more solar panels, not more expensive. That will continue to be the case for the next three orders of magnitude of marketed energy consumption growth.

Casteil 5y ago

It may help, but "any GPU on ebay for nothing"? Don't hold your breath...

jotm 5y ago

I really hope so, since I'm thinking of building a new computer for years now... Intel is releasing their own graphics cards, which is neat. It's a good time to enter the market, for sure.

mdoms 5y ago

Cryptocurrency propaganda.

dataangel 5y ago

> Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin. You fundamentally misunderstand how mining works. Difficulty automatically increases if blocks are being mined at faster than the expected rate. Needing more GPUs to mine the same number of coins raises the price.

jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
> Needing more GPUs to mine the same number of coins raises the price. Ridiculous. Price is determined by how much people are willing to buy or sell it at, which they decide based on speculation. The amount of GPUs that will be put to the task of mining is dependent on price. Not the other way around. I could create an alt coin that requires some arbitrarily large number of hashes to mine a single block and receive 1 coin as reward. Yet I cannot command a higher price for it, because no one wants to buy my coin.
- dataangel 5y ago
  Miners will only sell at prices that cover their costs. Yes you need demand too, but it's a question of equilibrium. If demand is high, price will go up, attracting more miners. But if the cost of energy/gpus goes up, miners won't be willing to sell for the same price as before, which will also increase the price.
CyberDildonics 5y ago
You have two things very wrong here. First, you are ignoring that difficulty adjustments can happen downward too. Second, you flipped the actually dynamic - the price swings dictate how much mining ends up being profitable, not the other way around. You might have also confused the difficulty adjustments with the reward decreasing over time.
- dataangel 5y ago
  No I meant difficulty adjustment and I know they can also adjust now. What's being missed here is that price go up because of buyer AND seller behavior. The dynamic goes both ways. If there is a demand increase, price goes up, so miners mine more. But if costs for miners go up, they won't sell for less than their costs, so that also causes the price to go up.

randomsilence 5y ago

Old numbers, but the trend was stable [1]: >Simple division yields an estimate of 13.982 million GPUs mining Ethereum on April 16 2021. >40 million graphic cards produced in 2020 It's just 1/3 of one year's production that could be freed if people don't move to other coins. Is that enough to crush the market? [1] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-many-gpus-are-in-the-world-just-sitting-there-mining-crypto-all-day/ https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-...

loonster 5y ago
Need to also know the average lifespan of GPU in mining. If it is 1year, that would effectively increase capacity by 50%.
- traceddd 5y ago
  Depends greatly on the conditions of the facility they were mining in. Heat kills these units. A professional set-up (not to be confused with a large one) will have much more mild impact on the units than a building with poor thermal considerations. Then again, high end miners will be running custom firmware which could also compromise the card lifespan.
0xcde4c3db 5y ago
As a point of reference, the network hashrate has nearly doubled since then, i.e. in under a year.
- ColonelPhantom 5y ago
  How much of that is attributed to GPUs? Do ASICs or FPGAs have any significant marketshare in ETH mining?
  - traceddd 5y ago
    Hard to say the number because it is difficult (but sometimes not impossible) to deduce the device from on chain data. ASICs do exist but they have not obsoleted GPUs like has happened on other projects (such as Bitcoin.) FPGAs were never big for mining. There was like 3 months in early Bitcoin where they people seriously tried deploying them but the simple fact is they are way too expensive from manufacturer markup for mining. And if you want to make your own you’ll just end up making an ASIC instead.

judge2020 5y ago

You can blame miners but it's just extremely high demand for these cards - once the merge happens and GPUs stop being super profitable, we'll see that not much has changed in terms of availability - and 40 series cards[0] will be just as hard to get. The only change might be a temporary drop in second-hand prices as the mining GPUs flood eBay for a month. 0: https://twitter.com/greymon55/status/1418795735802425349?s=20&t=0BXfU-VCy75A_F4EbOGVZQ https://twitter.com/greymon55/status/1418795735802425349?s=2...

abandonliberty 5y ago

Mining rewards and the price of a coin are mostly separate. Coins wouldn't crash, but rewards would be spread across more miners, reducing mining profits per hash rate.

freyr 5y ago

Perpetually right around the corner.