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by andreaorru 1936 days ago
Cool experiment. But I don't recommend getting into Ethereum mining now, as the network is on the verge of switching to Proof of Stake as part of the migration to Ethereum 2.0.
3 comments

Meh, it hasn’t switched yet, there’s still mining to be done.

I made ~$100 in the past month (stopped during the cold snap/storm here) on my 3080 mining ETH. Of course, I was getting closer to 90Mh/s so slightly more viable.

Sure, if you already have a mining rig, by all means keep mining!

But I personally wouldn't make a big investment on it if I was only getting started now.

Does this also imply lower energy consumption for running the ethereum network?
Yes! In fact that's one of the goals of the transition.
Well that's great for them.

Maybe (hopefully) we'll see environmental regulations against (expensive PoW) cryptocurrency before theres economically motivated regulation.

While I'm optimistic on PoS and excited about Ethereum adopting it, I think Bitcoin and PoW are being unjustly demonized and the issue is far more complex than what meets the eye.

I found this analysis insightful: https://coinshares.com/insights/beware-of-lazy-research-bitc...

Also this Twitter thread (12 tweets) and all the articles linked inside it: https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343401627979778

Does proof of stake truely ends the GPU arms race ?
Yep. You can run a validator node by staking at least 32 ETH (or any amount through a staking pool).

Nodes will still verify transactions and execute smart contracts, of course. But there's no hash lottery to be won for mining blocks.

I wonder if this may cause some correction on hardware stocks as market would be flooded with used GPUs.
There are plenty of other cryptocurrencies to mine
There are a few (mostly Bitcoin forks), and you can probably make some profit mining them, but they are not big enough to have a significant impact on the global demand for GPUs.

At this point, most crypto projects with any real traction (with the obvious exception of Bitcoin) are either ERC-20 tokens running on Ethereum, or other PoS chains that claim to be better than Ethereum (i.e. Cardano).

Bitcoin isn't mined with GPUs anymore.

As I said, there are plenty of profitable coins for GPU mining besides Ethereum [0]. Ethereum moving to PoS will not move the needle, people will just move on to something else.

[0]: https://whattomine.com/

What is bitcoin mined with now?