The recent announcement of the overhaul to the Ethereum blockchain has JPR President Jon Peddie chimed in for additional clarification.
According to him, Ethereum 2.0 will greatly disincentivize the use of GPU mining due to the change to the core consensus mechanism therefore high-end GPU demand for the cryptocurrency market would see a great drop followed by tons of ex-mining cards appearing in the second-hand market. Compared with NVIDIA’s “effort” of pushing mining-specific chips such as the CMP series (which isn’t the best decision due to excessive e-waste in the future by the way) and using hash rate limiters via software, the changes to the core mechanic of mining seems to be the better and longer way to go compared to short term band-aiding solution introduced by Team Green.
Compared to the current operating method Proof-Of-Work (PoW) where the reward is based on the number of computational tasks completed, the new Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism instead evaluate each participant’s value in the network where it is more likely to be affected by the number of computational nodes rather than combined power, thus eliminating the need for high-end GPUs and vastly higher clock speeds. While the shift to Ethereum 2.0 is currently taking place through multiple phases, it is expected that the project would only be completed during 2022 and is inclusive if there are no additional delays caused by any unexpected circumstances.
On the other hand, Chinese modders are able to bypass the hash limiter imposed by NVIDIA on the RTX 3060 to mine Octopus, another cryptocurrency at full efficiency as of now but even if they are able to crack the code for Ethereum, the need to manually flashing a custom vBIOS in addition the change to PoS architecture will still be able to deter some people from just plowing cash into some crazy mining farms and perhaps somehow stabilizing the GPU market starting next year. What’s more, cutting down unnecessary GPU computing will drastically reduce the carbon footprint generated through power consumption and indirectly protecting the Earth as well.
But I guess most people that have the slightest interest in cryptocurrency are more into the Bitcoin craze so the less GPU Ethereum miners take, they’ll get grabbed by Bitcoin miners anyway.
Sources: TechRadar, WCCFTech, BBC, GameRant
