How will this affect the revenue and stock prices of major hardware manufacturers? Particularly GPU manufacturers? If the price of GPU's drop due to a large second hand market opening up, would GPU manufacturers be hurt in any way?
I'm sure the lifespan of used GPUs is reduced, but it's hard to say by how much. There's probably a lot of variability due to chip yield and operating conditions (especially temperature and ESD safety). But if I could get one at half off, I'd probably take that chance.
I believe miners are more likely to undervolt their cards and with running them at a constant rate, they won’t undergo the same stress from heating up and cooling down each time it gets used.
I sure hope those people bought mining GPUs/put their money where their mouth is.
The next most valuable proof of work coin at <1% of the total market value is dogecoin, and that's already long been using ASIC miners like bitcoin.
Unless Ethereum miners forcibly maintain a PoW fork or try to pump up Ethereum Classic back into the spotlight, GPU mining might finally be effectively dead.
As many people have said for years, there's only room on this planet for one proof of work chain, and it's bitcoin. All other use cases with be proof of stake, or sidechains and layer twos of some base chain.
It would have been nice if they had at least moved to purpose made ASICs, like bitcoin had the decency to do.