1) The cards have already paid for themselves. They are 100% ROI positive and even at the current low amounts very profitable. Regardless of what W2M says, ETH is still the top most profitable coin. Large miners don't sell immediately, they wait for the market to go up or the option against their ETH holdings.
What? ETH isn’t the most profitable thing for these cards to mine. Why are you so confident that ETH switching to PoS will open the floodgates when ETH is already not the driver of their usage?
The ETH proof-of-stake switch isn’t going to be the driving force they causes GPUs to be abandoned in bulk.
> ETH isn’t the most profitable thing for these cards to mine.
You can mine shitcoins on a small scale for maybe a bit more profit. The issue is always unloading a lot of shitcoin in a very small volume market. Even ETC has a 6.5 day deposit time on exchanges like Kraken. Nobody is going to want to deal with that.
> The ETH proof-of-stake switch isn’t going to be the driving force they causes GPUs to be abandoned in bulk.
The GPUs will move to other shitcoins, which will cause the prices of those shitcoins to go down as people will mine and dump them, which will cause a lot of GPU miners to shut off.
Usually, with POW, the issuance is the same. So they will mint the same amount, no way that will crash the price. What _will_ make the mining not profitable is the difficulty increase. It boggles my mind people don't seem to get this.
The merge will absolutely happen, there are 12.6m ETH in the staking contract [1] that people want out of there and the only way to get it is to get to the next steps.
1) The cards have already paid for themselves. They are 100% ROI positive and even at the current low amounts very profitable. Regardless of what W2M says, ETH is still the top most profitable coin. Large miners don't sell immediately, they wait for the market to go up or the option against their ETH holdings.
2) ETH doesn't require latest hardware because the algo is memory hard, which means that the bottle neck is in the memory controller, not in the speed of the GPU chip itself. https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor...
3) The actual consumable is electricity price, which really hasn't changed much in the last few years for large miners who have contracts.