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Comment by randomsilence | Hacker News Reader

Old numbers, but the trend was stable [1]:

>Simple division yields an estimate of 13.982 million GPUs mining Ethereum on April 16 2021.

>40 million graphic cards produced in 2020

It's just 1/3 of one year's production that could be freed if people don't move to other coins. Is that enough to crush the market?

[1] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-...

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Need to also know the average lifespan of GPU in mining. If it is 1year, that would effectively increase capacity by 50%.

Depends greatly on the conditions of the facility they were mining in. Heat kills these units. A professional set-up (not to be confused with a large one) will have much more mild impact on the units than a building with poor thermal considerations. Then again, high end miners will be running custom firmware which could also compromise the card lifespan.

As a point of reference, the network hashrate has nearly doubled since then, i.e. in under a year.

How much of that is attributed to GPUs? Do ASICs or FPGAs have any significant marketshare in ETH mining?

Hard to say the number because it is difficult (but sometimes not impossible) to deduce the device from on chain data. ASICs do exist but they have not obsoleted GPUs like has happened on other projects (such as Bitcoin.)

FPGAs were never big for mining. There was like 3 months in early Bitcoin where they people seriously tried deploying them but the simple fact is they are way too expensive from manufacturer markup for mining. And if you want to make your own you’ll just end up making an ASIC instead.

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