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Comment by imhoguy | Hacker News Reader

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/

The hash rate for all the other projects beside Ethereum is minuscule.

Sure, some of it will move to other currencies, but my guess would be it won't be anywhere near 100% as you're suggesting.

Why is the current hashrate relevant? The market will readjust to changes in hashrate.

It is relevant because I don't think the rest of the projects will end up absorbing all of Ethereum's hashrate. First of all, some of the current miners will sell their hardware and stake ETH instead, becoming validators.

Secondly, I tend to think there'll be a mass extinction event, where most useless projects will eventually die off. You can mine all you want, but if there's no real utility in yet another PoW project (and there isn't), you won't be able to sell the coins at a price that justifies running the operation.

What is bitcoin mined with now?

ASICs.

ASICs like the Ant miner series.

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