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> ETH will soon move from PoW to PoS (let's not debate the timeline or if it is a good idea). This will put about 32 million GPUs worth of compute and millions

> ETH will soon move from PoW to PoS (let's not debate the timeline or if it is a good idea). This will put about 32 million GPUs worth of compute and millions of CPUs searching for something else to do (or just flood the market with used equipment). Crypto markets crashing together could do this, but ETH's switch isn't going to do much for old cards. Checking https://whattomine.com/ https://whattomine.com/ shows that ETH mining isn't even in the top 5 most profitable things to mine with a 1080Ti right now. The miners looking to squeeze every bit of profitability out of old hardware switched away from ETH a long time ago.

RealityVoid 4y ago
I hear people say this, but I am absolutely certain their assumptions are wrong. 1) The sum total of rewards is fixed for POW 2) Introducing extra hashing power will increase the difficulties of these mining ops up to the profitability equilibrium point. After the overall "free" hashing power increases to a point, GPU's will start flooding the market at dumping prices. It will be incredibly rad!
latchkey 4y ago
Wrong. Why? 1) The cards have already paid for themselves. They are 100% ROI positive and even at the current low amounts very profitable. Regardless of what W2M says, ETH is still the top most profitable coin. Large miners don't sell immediately, they wait for the market to go up or the option against their ETH holdings. 2) ETH doesn't require latest hardware because the algo is memory hard, which means that the bottle neck is in the memory controller, not in the speed of the GPU chip itself. https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memory-hardness-explained https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor... 3) The actual consumable is electricity price, which really hasn't changed much in the last few years for large miners who have contracts.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Wrong. Why? What? ETH isn’t the most profitable thing for these cards to mine. Why are you so confident that ETH switching to PoS will open the floodgates when ETH is already not the driver of their usage? The ETH proof-of-stake switch isn’t going to be the driving force they causes GPUs to be abandoned in bulk.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    > ETH isn’t the most profitable thing for these cards to mine. You can mine shitcoins on a small scale for maybe a bit more profit. The issue is always unloading a lot of shitcoin in a very small volume market. Even ETC has a 6.5 day deposit time on exchanges like Kraken. Nobody is going to want to deal with that. > The ETH proof-of-stake switch isn’t going to be the driving force they causes GPUs to be abandoned in bulk. The GPUs will move to other shitcoins, which will cause the prices of those shitcoins to go down as people will mine and dump them, which will cause a lot of GPU miners to shut off.
    - RealityVoid 4y ago
      Usually, with POW, the issuance is the same. So they will mint the same amount, no way that will crash the price. What _will_ make the mining not profitable is the difficulty increase. It boggles my mind people don't seem to get this.
      - latchkey 4y ago
        More hashrate will earn more of the pie.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    > the ETH proof-of-stake switch isn’t going to be the driving force they causes GPUs to be abandoned in bulk. The proof-of-stake switch is also pretty unlikely to ever actually happen.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      The merge will absolutely happen, there are 12.6m ETH in the staking contract [1] that people want out of there and the only way to get it is to get to the next steps. [1] https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe0...
      - 4y ago

RealityVoid 4y ago

I hear people say this, but I am absolutely certain their assumptions are wrong. 1) The sum total of rewards is fixed for POW 2) Introducing extra hashing power will increase the difficulties of these mining ops up to the profitability equilibrium point. After the overall "free" hashing power increases to a point, GPU's will start flooding the market at dumping prices. It will be incredibly rad!

latchkey 4y ago

Wrong. Why? 1) The cards have already paid for themselves. They are 100% ROI positive and even at the current low amounts very profitable. Regardless of what W2M says, ETH is still the top most profitable coin. Large miners don't sell immediately, they wait for the market to go up or the option against their ETH holdings. 2) ETH doesn't require latest hardware because the algo is memory hard, which means that the bottle neck is in the memory controller, not in the speed of the GPU chip itself. https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memory-hardness-explained https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor... 3) The actual consumable is electricity price, which really hasn't changed much in the last few years for large miners who have contracts.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Wrong. Why? What? ETH isn’t the most profitable thing for these cards to mine. Why are you so confident that ETH switching to PoS will open the floodgates when ETH is already not the driver of their usage? The ETH proof-of-stake switch isn’t going to be the driving force they causes GPUs to be abandoned in bulk.
- latchkey 4y ago
  > ETH isn’t the most profitable thing for these cards to mine. You can mine shitcoins on a small scale for maybe a bit more profit. The issue is always unloading a lot of shitcoin in a very small volume market. Even ETC has a 6.5 day deposit time on exchanges like Kraken. Nobody is going to want to deal with that. > The ETH proof-of-stake switch isn’t going to be the driving force they causes GPUs to be abandoned in bulk. The GPUs will move to other shitcoins, which will cause the prices of those shitcoins to go down as people will mine and dump them, which will cause a lot of GPU miners to shut off.
  - RealityVoid 4y ago
    Usually, with POW, the issuance is the same. So they will mint the same amount, no way that will crash the price. What _will_ make the mining not profitable is the difficulty increase. It boggles my mind people don't seem to get this.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      More hashrate will earn more of the pie.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  > the ETH proof-of-stake switch isn’t going to be the driving force they causes GPUs to be abandoned in bulk. The proof-of-stake switch is also pretty unlikely to ever actually happen.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    The merge will absolutely happen, there are 12.6m ETH in the staking contract [1] that people want out of there and the only way to get it is to get to the next steps. [1] https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe0...
    - 4y ago