Ethereum Switches to Proof of Stake, GPU Mining Is Dead
Ethereum Switches to Proof of Stake, GPU Mining Is Dead
Good news for gamers, or at least the ones who didn’t mine Ethereum with their graphics cards.
Sources: techPowerUp!, The Verge, Vitalik Buterin (Twitter)
Ethereum Switches to Proof of Stake, GPU Mining Is Dead
Good news for gamers, or at least the ones who didn’t mine Ethereum with their graphics cards.
NVIDIA Ada and AMD RDNA3 will not sell to Ethereum miners. In a dramatic move, the creators of Ethereum have switched over the popular crypto-currency's algorithm from proof-of-work, to proof-of-stake, which means miners will no longer spend GPU resources in competing to find the same blocks. This effectively ends GPU-accelerated mining as Ethereum mining was the number-1 consumer of high-end GPUs through 2021. The switch-over happened as the total terminal difficulty surpassed 58,750,000,000T, with the last block having been found. With this move, global electricity consumption is expected to reduce by 0.2% (that's enough to power the world's top 5 cities).
The impact of this move on GPU sales to crypto-currency miners is expected to be profound. GPUs are no longer an economical way to mine Bitcoin, ASICs are; and Ethereum mining constituted the bulk of activity from GPU-accelerated mining farms. This doesn't mean there aren't other crypto-currencies that rely on GPU-accelerated proof-of-work blockchain compute; but Ethereum had the highest market-cap among such currencies. Gamers have reason to rejoice, as NVIDIA and AMD now have to sell high-end GPUs squarely on merits of gaming performance, power-draw, and graphics card pricing.
Sources: techPowerUp!, The Verge, Vitalik Buterin (Twitter)
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