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Comment by TheDudeMan | Hacker News Reader

If you were a crypto miner and had a pile of GPUs would they be powered-off right now? Of course not.

There's virtually no other ASIC resistant (i.e. can use GPU) PoW coin left to mine. There's the proof-of-work ETH fork, but it only has a market cap less than 2% of than real ETH. So even though they juiced the block rewards, miner rewards are more than 90% lower, which isn't enough to pay for electricity of the previous hash rate.

ETH classic hash rate went from 50 to nearly 300 Th/s. https://2miners.com/etc-network-hashrate

Yep. But with that the difficulty is going through the roof and earnings are dropping. Ethereum had A LOT of hash power while ETC isn't really used by anyone so where are the earnings supposed to come from. It's not going to be economically viable because the electricity is a fixed cost, even if some individual miners are trying it out.

There is a new PoW fork that was started by miners that want to continue mining. Some of the work could go there assuming it doesn't tank. I personally don't see the utility though, doubt it will be able to attract many users.

And the price remained the same, so it is now 6x less profitable to mine than before (it was barely profitable before this)

Reality will set in eventually. It was just the lazy place to point the cards, the pools will get tired of wasting that money pretty fast.

What about Monero? Isn't that PoW and asic resistant?

Although irc you need to use a cpu, not a gpu to mine it.

True, there are not many (or any) that will be as profitable but some still exist such as ergo, https://ergoplatform.org/en/get-erg/#Mining .

Turned off is more profitable than running at a loss for miners that need to fund their opex by selling what they mine.

It looks like it's already happening. After the merge there were a number of coins that saw huge spikes in hash rate which drove them to absolutely unprofitable levels. A lot of that hash rate has since gone elsewhere (most likely offline) and it looks like many coins are settling at a level in the short term that is breakeven at $0.06-0.08 kWh which many (most?) miners can't be profitable at as that is below their electric rate.

I think this is potentially the most interesting comment in here. If all of those GPUs just flipped to another cryptocurrency, global energy reduction would be zero.

In the short term, that's true because the GPUs are already purchased. In the long run, people will invest in new cryptocurrency mining rigs very much in proportion to the profitability of running one.

Also a great comment. :) Good points on both short- and long-term effects.

Yes. At the moment the marginal cost for the average ETH miner is higher than the marginal revenue of any GPU minable chain.

Unless you’re stealing power.

The "average miner" is not stealing power.

It will if you can't mine enough to cover the cost of the electricity required to run it, which is true if you want to mine BTC with it, for example.

Not necessarily. It's true if the person making the decision is getting paid directly from the mining. But perverse incentives abound in the cryptocurrency space. For example, consider Celsius:

https://amycastor.com/2022/09/11/crypto-collapse-celsius-voy...

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/08/11/crypto-colla...

As they thrash around in bankruptcy, they have proposed that they will mine their way out of the hole. Will this work? I doubt it. But will it let the CEO stay in charge for a while longer, taking in more investor money and continuing to get paid? Possibly! So actual economic efficiency may not matter.

well it certainly won't be used to mine Ethereum anymore and if this is the trend we will see more "high volume" coins see dropping PoW even further.

Those pile of GPU are going to be a write off since prices are dropping and supply issue improves as well.

if you are part of a mining pool, its possible they just auto-switched you to mine another coin (Ethereum Classic, LiteCoin, etc)

My friend sold most of his GPUs a few weeks ago and you can see it in GPU prices.

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