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Comment by MatthiasPortzel | Hacker News Reader

This is surprising to me for two reasons. The first is that we knew the merge was coming. Second is that it wasn’t obvious to me that Ethereum was a majority of mining.

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Ethereum was a majority of GPU mining. Bitcoin miners use ASICs. And mining was profitable right until it wasn't, so why not wait until then?

The marginal gain from a few days/weeks of mining might not outweigh the drop in value of the hardware.

But who would be buying these cards? Other miners looking to mine to the last second might not be so keen on expanding their operation. And gamers looking for cheap cards would be better served by waiting for the merge.

There’s always a market for GPUs. The market was trading higher immediately before the merge, and now it’s trading lower, so if you ran a mining operation then selling your hardware before the merge would’ve yielded some good money unless you held so much it would actually change the market price (unlikely).

So why did the price drop so suddenly? Why didn’t everyone anticipate this and sell before? Probably some combination of laziness and belief that the merge wouldn’t work.

My guess... it has more to do with the logistics of uninstalling hundreds, or even thousands, of GPUs and then prepping them for sale on eBay. Its probably more profitable to use them for mining until the very last second and then sell them in bulk to an eBay vendor or foreign nation or whoever is in the market for pallets of GPUs.

gamers might not be paying attention to the merge situation.

Not the majority of gamers. But gamers in the used GPU market? Most def.

I mined for a few weeks out of curiosity and I figured it would work as a heater downstairs since it was winter. I would think that the best move was to sell your GPU about a month before it all ends since the actual mining doesn’t make enough money to offset the resale value plummet.

So regarding your first point, the merge has been coming for years now. I suspect the folks who kept mining and didn't dump their cards earlier were basically making the bet that the merge would fail or get delayed once again.

If they had been right, it would've meant more mining rewards going to fewer miners. So it's an understandable bet. They just bet wrong.

Yes, also, if they acquired these cards at or below MSRP. Now they can dump these GPUs and only take a loss of 10-20% on the hardware. Much less than the profits made while mining.

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