Ethereum finally goes POS, marking the end of gpu mining era

[Origami Cactus]

 

Summary

Ethereum merged it's mainnet with beaconchain on september 15, 6:43 GMT, making it now proof-of-stake and lowering it's electricity usage 99.95%.

 

Quotes

Quote

The Merge represented the official switch to using the Beacon Chain as the engine of block production. Mining is no longer the means of producing valid blocks. Instead, the proof-of-stake validators have adopted this role and are now responsible for processing the validity of all transactions and proposing blocks.

Ethereum creator V. Buterin claims that the merge will reduce worldwide electricity consumption by 0.2%, which is huge if true.

Popular reddit GPU mining subreddit with almost 100k members also completely closed their discord and subreddit because of the merge.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gpumining/comments/xecer8/the_end_of_rgpumining/

Looking at whattomine.com, all the remaining alternative coins also give you next to no profit, if your electricity isn't free.

 

 

My thoughts

We have heard of Ethereum going POS "next year" since 2017, but they finally did it. While GPU miners currently are searching for smaller coins they can mine with their GPUs, the profits will absolutely freefall, because none of the smaller coins have a large number of buyers interested in buying the coins the miners mine. Some miners have wanted to fork Ethereum, but their coin EthereumPoW is only worth a small fraction of Ethereum's price, because again, noone except miners is actually interested in it.

It is also nice that they did it before the next gen Nvidia and AMD gpus launch, so it will be very interested to see how they will be priced, and how the availability will be, now that miners aren't interested in them anymore.

 

Sources

https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/09/15/the-ethereum-merge-is-done-did-it-work/

 

 

[jagdtigger]

Good, but im afraid those <insert proper terminology i cannot use> will create something else......

[Origami Cactus]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

Good, but im afraid those <insert proper terminology i cannot use> will create something else......

Updated the article. Some miners plan to fork Ethereum with a new coin, but currently it is worth at least 40x less than Ethereum, making for abysmal profits.

The point is that for mining to bring in money, there has to be someone willing to buy the coins they sell, and with big coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum it was easy, but no mainstream investor will buy some really small coin that has no real value and can't be used for anything.

[RollinLower]

lets see those mining GPUs flood the used market please!

[Drama Lama]

Can't wait for the creation of 10 new  pump and dumperino coins, whose only feature is being like Ethereum but still with mining.

[Stahlmann]

35 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Good, but im afraid those <insert proper terminology i cannot use> will create something else......

For now at least it seems there is no worthwhile alternative coin to mine.

[Sauron]

50 minutes ago, Origami Cactus said:

Buterin claims that the merge will reduce worldwide electricity consumption by 0.2%, which is huge if true.

if true it also makes ethereum's existence up to this point a crime against humanity...

[tikker]

Nice to see the merge finally happening after postponing multiple times. It will be interesting to see what happens to it given the current state of the crypto market.

1 hour ago, Origami Cactus said:

Updated the article. Some miners plan to fork Ethereum with a new coin, but currently it is worth at least 40x less than Ethereum, making for abysmal profits.

The point is that for mining to bring in money, there has to be someone willing to buy the coins they sell, and with big coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum it was easy, but no mainstream investor will buy some really small coin that has no real value and can't be used for anything.

I guess Ethereum Classic will finally die completely if that happens.

[Blue4130]

If it's anything like Chia coin, Harddrive prices are about to go up.

[Alex Atkin UK]

38 minutes ago, Sauron said:

if true it also makes ethereum's existence up to this point a crime against humanity...

A crime against all life on earth more like, unless you can argue that was all green energy.

Pollution for profit is just downright evil and dumb, although this doesn't exactly fix that problem either.

 

I'm kinda surprised cryptocurrency hasn't been banned in most countries by now, given its value must be mostly thanks to how useful it is for money laundering and purchasing illegal items.  It was naive of the creators to ever thing it would merely be this great decentralised currency that bypasses government intervention.  But then currency in general is a bit of a weird concept to begin with if you really think about it, it only has value because we act like it does (which is why they thought they could get everyone to switch).

[Sauron]

7 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

unless you can argue that was all green energy.

even if you could that green energy could have been used for something good

 

8 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

It was naive of the creators to ever thing it would merely be this great decentralised currency that bypasses government intervention.

it wasn't them being naive, it was them lying

[mr moose]

Interesting, they've been using .2% of the worlds power to generate 0.067% of the worlds (unnecessary) currency.

 

 

 

 

[mr moose]

31 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

  It was naive of the creators to ever thing it would merely be this great decentralised currency that bypasses government intervention. 

Not sure about the creators, but it was certainly naive of people to believe it.  There is a reason it never really got banned, and that is because there is no such thing as a currency that can be independent of market forces (one of which is government doing their job with the economy).

 

 

[Taf the Ghost]

23 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

A crime against all life on earth more like, unless you can argue that was all green energy.

Pollution for profit is just downright evil and dumb, although this doesn't exactly fix that problem either.

 

I'm kinda surprised cryptocurrency hasn't been banned in most countries by now, given its value must be mostly thanks to how useful it is for money laundering and purchasing illegal items.  It was naive of the creators to ever thing it would merely be this great decentralised currency that bypasses government intervention.  But then currency in general is a bit of a weird concept to begin with if you really think about it, it only has value because we act like it does (which is why they thought they could get everyone to switch).

Bitcoin wasn't the first cryptocurrency. It was just the first one to really take off and address the "minting" issues inherent in currency supply maintenance & have a very efficient ledger system. (There's inherent issues with any currency system, so there's research literature on this stuff going back over 100 years. Because paper currency is centuries old and metal currency is millennia old.) It also billed itself as "Digital Gold" more than anything else. While big public backers are keen on it replacing currencies for valid reasons, the project never actually had that potential. 

 

Ethereum is different. With its early institutional support, it's always been more of a test bed for new FinTech insights and a prelude to Central Bank Digital Currencies. (Blockchain approaches are here to stay because they're very useful for a lot of internal tracking systems.) It's about both a lot higher transaction volumes & pushing anyone else out of the space. There's too much utility in Blockchain technology, which means its "new tech". So there's power positions to be made by running a project/company to the top of a field over all others. It's what we've seen happen in ETH. The utility of GPU mining for its long term objectives is simply done. 

 

That's why this stuff isn't banned, generally. Though there's functional aspects that most countries don't allow other "legal tender" to be used, but no one has ever successfully restricted bartering. You'd accomplish very little. Unless you're China and you can ban every app anyone would use. Which they did.

[mr moose]

4 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

 

That's why this stuff isn't banned, generally. Though there's functional aspects that most countries don't allow other "legal tender" to be used, but no one has ever successfully restricted bartering. You'd accomplish very little. Unless you're China and you can ban every app anyone would use. Which they did.

Even bartering succumbs to the usual market forces,  old slow Joe still has to pay his taxes and buy his food, so whatever he wants to trade for it has to have enough value.

[Arika]

So...when do you think the announcement hit?

 

[tim0901]

2 hours ago, Origami Cactus said:

Ethereum finally goes POS

I will never read POS as anything other than Piece Of Shit. And yes that about sums up my opinion on crypto too.

[Fasterthannothing]

2 hours ago, Origami Cactus said:

Updated the article. Some miners plan to fork Ethereum with a new coin, but currently it is worth at least 40x less than Ethereum, making for abysmal profits.

The point is that for mining to bring in money, there has to be someone willing to buy the coins they sell, and with big coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum it was easy, but no mainstream investor will buy some really small coin that has no real value and can't be used for anything.

You do realize if they fork Ethereum and everyone leaves Ethereum for the other coin the tables have turned and now Ethereum made itself worthless. I honestly think it's disgusting that they removed mining from the coin. That was how people could invest in the coin and support it without feeling like they would lose all their money if it went upside down since they could always sell their hardware later down the road. I see very little if any value in a coin you cannot mine as there are no actual users who care about the technology still invested now it will just be a bunch of rich people buying coins for no other reason than stonks go up and you need a massive amount of coins to do a proof of stake and make a return.

[Fasterthannothing]

14 minutes ago, Arika S said:

So...when do you think the announcement hit?

 

This is what I pointed out in my comment above everyone says other coins are less profitable but at this rate Ethereum won't be worth $100 in a month they literally shot themselves in the foot on this one.

[Avocado Diaboli]

26 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

You do realize if they fork Ethereum and everyone leaves Ethereum for the other coin the tables have turned and now Ethereum made itself worthless. I honestly think it's disgusting that they removed mining from the coin. That was how people could invest in the coin and support it without feeling like they would lose all their money if it went upside down since they could always sell their hardware later down the road. I see very little if any value in a coin you cannot mine as there are no actual users who care about the technology still invested now it will just be a bunch of rich people buying coins for no other reason than stonks go up and you need a massive amount of coins to do a proof of stake and make a return.

I feel like this comment is a perfect encapsulation of the whole debacle that crypto in general has been. It's entirely focused on the potential to rip off people stupid enough to invest in the closed, zero-sum system that crypto is from the perspective of the person ripping off the others. Never mind that not an ounce of thought is spared on the fact that this so called "currency" is nothing but a commodity to be traded. It's a tacit admission that crypto serves no purpose whatsoever, regardless of how much energy it uses with either method of conducting transactions.

 

Bottom line is, crypto is a cancer that needs to be eradicated at the root.

[Lightwreather]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

-snip-

Makes sense, given that the majority of people using it for anything were interested in it because mining. 

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

Ethereum going PoS solves two of Blockchain self inflicted problems:

• Energy use
• Hardware use.

I welcome the news! The shortage on the next generation of graphics cards will be measured in weeks, not years thanks to ETH PoW going the way of the Dodo.

 

Ethereum going PoS obviously solves none of the other self inflicted problems of Blockchain technology:

• Speed will still be 15 transactions per seconds
• Gas fees will still be high and volatile because the fees are result of transactions slots being auctioned off, and in high load fees will still be high
  
• The network is still mostly irreversible, meaning neither errors nor frauds can be reversed
  

[Fasterthannothing]

1 hour ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

I feel like this comment is a perfect encapsulation of the whole debacle that crypto in general has been. It's entirely focused on the potential to rip off people stupid enough to invest in the closed, zero-sum system that crypto is from the perspective of the person ripping off the others. Never mind that not an ounce of thought is spared on the fact that this so called "currency" is nothing but a commodity to be traded. It's a tacit admission that crypto serves no purpose whatsoever, regardless of how much energy it uses with either method of conducting transactions.

 

Bottom line is, crypto is a cancer that needs to be eradicated at the root.

Your hilarious and delusional all at the same time. If proof of stake was good why is it that the biggest crypto in the world Bitcoin isn't using it?  Proof of stake is the definition of a hostile takeover anyone such as a government entity who controls the majority stake in the coin runs the entire system. Proof of work in the other hand requires massive hardware farms to even come close to controlling a fraction of the system. This is a wonderful article detailing the insanely flawed proof of stake system and lack of any actual fundamental value held in such a coin as well as the reason for value in a Proof of work coin 

 

https://medium.com/@BobMcElrath/whats-wrong-with-proof-of-stake-77d4f370be15

[Avocado Diaboli]

3 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Your hilarious and delusional all at the same time. If proof of stake was good why is it that the biggest crypto in the world Bitcoin isn't using it?  Proof of stake is the definition of a hostile takeover anyone such as a government entity who controls the majority stake in the coin runs the entire system. Proof of work in the other hand requires massive hardware farms to even come close to controlling a fraction of the system. This is a wonderful article detailing the insanely flawed proof of stake system and lack of any actual fundamental value held in such a coin as well as the reason for value in a Proof of work coin 

 

https://medium.com/@BobMcElrath/whats-wrong-with-proof-of-stake-77d4f370be15

For one, I haven't actually argued for or against either, so I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me. But you do realize that "the majority stake" is just "owning the biggest rig in the system" under proof of work, right? Regardless of the method, neither are shielded against someone just taking over by investing the most money into the system.

[Heliian]

3 hours ago, tikker said:

Nice to see the merge finally happening after postponing multiple times

The only reason is for them to try and keep it alive at all.  The scam fell apart, nobody wants to touch the stuff now.