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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

Ethereum moving to full proof of stake (vs. proof of work which is what mining is) should fix a lot of this. So hang tight if gpu prices have you down. What is the timetable for that?

There will be a glut of graphics cards the likes of which has never been seen, once Ethereum is no longer mined.

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Proof of stake is a quarter away. It’s been that way since 2018, and it’ll probably be that way at the heat death of the universe.

It is already partially implemented now. Just waiting on the full rollout.

https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/

Sometimes it feels like these processes work like radioactive decay. They don't make progress, they just suddenly happen.

As an outsider, what’s stopping further progress in this? I would have thought, proof of stake is “it”, why hasn’t it taken over?

An incentive for anyone to switch.

It's very new technology so it has taken years to refine and test.

It is highly controversial and plagued with unsolvable security drawbacks compared to Proof of Work.

As someone that's been watching the process fairly closely, that's not my read on the situation. I think it's moreso just a new technology that takes time to perfect, and Ethereum is a large ship, hence "changing course" take a lot of effort.

In an Ethereum echochamber it may seem like that. More generally on 'why hasnt it taken over?' a lot of projects have communities that laugh at the security properties of PoS; they will never consider it

Why is it people think Ethereum mining is what's driving this?

The mass mining farms don't give a shit about Ethereum. They literally mine whatever coin is most profitable to then be exchanged into Bitcoin. Everyone's going after BTC. There's a Bitcoin ATM in a service station convenience store near my house.

No one is going to give a shit when Ethereum moves to proof of stake, because they'll just switch to some other coin that still uses proof of work and thereby mines easily on their GPU farm and can then be exchanged for BTC.

Well Ethereum has massive hash rate and is still mined on GPUs largely. No one mines btc on GPUs.

It's possible that soon whatever coin is most profitable to mine won't be profitable enough to justify buying more GPUs. There's always a limit.

> whatever coin is most profitable to mine won't be profitable enough to justify buying more GPUs

This is exactly where I'd like to see it all go.

If there is a significant gap between Ethereum and the second most profitable coin, taking Ethereum out of the market will make the whole mining business less profitable.

(This will in turn make some operations no longer economically viable, dropping GPU demand)

"Never"?

The Ethereum PoS chain is already active today and giving "staking" rewards. PoW is still active too but both chains are mining ETH at the moment and the plan is to switch to PoS only.

As the PoS did actually launch and is actually working, I'm not sure it's going to be "never".

They may be late like so many software projects, but they seem to be serious about the switch to proof of stake.

For those that don't know, staking is a dedicated computer + 32 ETH in escrow, then you get your ETH back + 1/2 ETH payment at the end of the month but fewer if you were offline including possibly losing some of your escrowed ETH.

What is the computer doing during that time?

Validating or creating blocks, which to be clear is _significantly_ less work than mining.

Voting on block proposals as part of a randomly assigned committee.

So it's not possible to stake without 32 ETH to stake? That's a sizeable investment.

staking pools are a thing

So at what point do they throw the switch that invalidates millions of dollars of investment in mining Etherum? Or is it all transferrable? And who is the "they" that throws the switch?

I only see your comment now, sorry for the late reply.

Well as I understand I it was clear from day one that Ethereum would switch "one day" to PoS so miners knew, from the start, what they were in for.

> ... that invalidates millions of dollars of investment in mining Etherum...

Well the GPUs will not be able to mine ETH anymore but the ETH already mined aren't lost: the PoW chain is going to merged inside the PoS one.

I take it this all decided by the "Ethereum foundation"?

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