Will GPU mining end after the Merge (formerly called ETH 2.0)? | Hacker News Reader

Will GPU mining end after the Merge (formerly called ETH 2.0)?

bitproit.com

48 pointslalaland112535 comments

Honestly GPU mining ending would be an amazing thing. There is nothing but negatives coming out of GPU mining for the vast majority of people:

1. GPU mining sucks up absurd amounts of power. This is terrible for the environment because this is just a straight increase in the amount of electricity required for the grid to function - this will inevitably result in more electricity being produced via dirtier methods as opposed to renewable methods because the amount of renewable electricity we are producing is far outpaced by the increase in electricity required due to mining.

2. It, for an incredibly long time, caused there to be virtually no stock in the GPU market for people using them for purposes that aren't mining (gaming, research computing, etc), especially in the middle of the pandemic when chip supplies were already at an extreme low. It also caused scalpers to crawl out of their various holes because they saw they could make a profit by overcharging people extreme amounts for the limited supply of GPUs that weren't being used for mining.

The author comes off as upset that GPU is planned to come to an effective end. GPU miners deserve nothing to avoid "carnage" (as the author puts it) and should have known the risk before creating a GPU shortage.

Yeah, I too have zero sympathy for GPU miners. They deserve to drown in their increasingly worthless GPUs.

I'm licking my lips at the prospect of putting together an ML rig from all the RTX 3090s hitting the market.

Same

As if ML applications were ethically sounder than PoW coins...

ML for cancer-diagnosis of image-scans? Identification of endangered species? Translating dying languages?

I get the point you're making, and would add that some ML applications bring tangible benefits to humanity which are proportionate to their energy consumption.

There's a token for that. /s

Yep they certainly do. I'm sure there are also some ethically sound blockchain implementations out there somewhere.

I'm skeptical. How?

You'd need a "proof of ethics" and that seems technologically dubious.

Or, you'd be using blockchain to create an ethical application, and whatever benefits are realized by the application are probably not best provided by blockchain.

Using computing to compute meaningful data is directly justified or at least directly measurable.

I got such delicious catharsis from reading this! Guilt-free schadenfreude. It's like reading an article by BP and Haliburton whining about breakthrough supercapacitors, or fusion finally arrives and the coal miners are salty.

"Where is the miner resistance?" Good question, maybe they can hire tobacco lobbyists or something.

Okay, let's not give them advice that actually works!

>At this point, we are 100% focused on assisting miners in their exit from GPU mining, temporarily or permanently. No matter the size or location of your farm, we can make a buyout offer

Just to be clear for those who weren't paying attention, all this panic being pushed is because they want to buy out other miners. Eth is clearly profitable enough for them to be buying in, despite their claim that this time, no really, PoS is just around the corner.

My personal guess is that PoS will probably hit some horrible exploit pretty quickly and they'll all be back to the drawing board pretty quick.

Isn't the point of "the Merge" to kill GPU mining? One of the most common criticisms of crypto is the environmental impact.

Won't the impact simply be via ASIC miners instead?

no, eth is not changing the proof of work algorithm, it is moving to proof of stake.

Yes. My understanding is there will still be a fair amount of computation by "validators" who need to process transactions and run the methods on the smart contracts, but GPU mining will entirely stop at least on the ethereum network[1].

The difference between validator computation and computation by miners is that validators are running contract code that does something that someone has asked for vs miners are just running calculations just to prove they have (ie the calculations themselves are entirely unneccessary outside of mining.

[1] Bitcoin for example will still be doing this type of mining and "the merge" itself is entirely an ethereum thing.

Bitcoin hasn't been GPU mining in a very long time. It uses custom ASICs. The distinction is that bitcoin itself has very little effect on the GPU market. However, seeing as most coins are pretty correlated with bitcoin, at least until they completely fail, bitcoin price has like a second order effect on the GPU market.

I hate these blogs that dont post the publish date - but the metatags suggests this was published 2022-05-27T20:05:21+00:00 - ETH has lost almost half its "price" since then.

Agreed, this is the worst. If only google could just SHOW US the author/modified date

oh no! what will we do with GPUs instead now? I guess we'll have to resort to making it render things and playing games.

Yup. A huge win for the environment.

Yes but unironically

The author is just fixating on the worst, most destructive part of crypto like it's fine. Probably representative of their behavior in the rest of life.

I'm amused by the re-naming exercises and attendant mental gymnastics. It's no longer a "hard-fork", it's a "network upgrade". It's no longer "ETH2.0", it'll still be ETH.

It's too lucrative and there's a lot of whales that can manipulate markets

My hypothesis is that there going to be another Blockchain where you can mine that comes up

There's always going to be the old Ethereum chain. No one can turn it off if people want to fork it.

And asset-backed stable coins like USDC will not be redeemable from the GPU chain.

The energy consumption debates are a distraction from innovation, so many want The Merge to happen soon to get past this energy issue.

Ethereum "classic" is still around for the "code is law" diehards. I'd expect most of the people who are fine with the current ETH hard-fork chain will probably be fine with the merge.

It'd be interesting if we did end up with three live chains though, probably not sustainable.

Well, the current chain that everyone is following does still have the 'ice age' in it that come September will start making mining new blocks take exponentially longer to mine. If the miners want to continue with the POW chain, they'll have to coordinate a fork of their own to delay or remove the ice age. And that there is the rub. The ethereum miners have never been very good at coordinating amongst themselves.

Not to mention, Even if they fork, the value of the token depends on what the community believes it to be. Even if the majority of miners are in support of a hardfork, it's the majority of population who decides which chain has what worth (by simple supply/demand).

It will be another Ethereum Classic.

It's quite likely that the old Ethereum chain will almost completely die off because although noone can force anyone not to fork it, the transaction fees on the new network will be a fraction of the old one, so there will be a big incentive for people to use the new chain.

I agree it's completely possible. I wanted to explore the possibility of forces that are powerfully incentivized for this not to happen

Yes all the responses are valid technical and logistical challenges.

If there are a bunch of groups with millions to billions in assets financially incentived for something to exist then my bet is going to be on that thing to exist until such a time as the market forces change to eliminate that need

For a chain the amount of GPUs that can profitably mine is a function of token value and electricity price. For the ecosystem as a whole it’s the sum of all (GPU mining capable) chains. Take out the largest market cap chain (bitcoin doesn’t count, it’s ASIC only at this point), and you drastically reduce the total number of GPUs to saturate the crypto mining market.

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