The people who were mining ETH didn't give a toss about the environment. They invested in PoW hardware and they're not going to stop using it because ETH is now PoS, they'll just mine something else.
I just hope the PoW markets collapse now ETH is moving on.
That is rude. I care about the environment, still I am mining.
How is it good for the environment? I only mine when my house and battery does not need electricity and our solar is producing over 1kw. Everything I earn (around 100-300$ a month between February to Oktober) I invest in the next environment project. My miners need about 500w. This is a fraction of the amount I put back into the grid.
If I would not do this, our new heating system wouldn't be financed yet.
You are certainly right.
However I am under the assumption that you only mine where electricity is cheap. If you are not stealing it, there is only nuclear, wind, water and sun produced energy left => Miners are kind of forced to use environment friendly energy.
It's better for the environment if we build expensive cables to send that power to areas still emitting CO2, instead of selling it cheaply to miners. At least up to some pretty large distance.
There's a case to be made for using the spikes of solar power to run miners, on a grid dominated by renewables, but that requires the economics to work out just right with very cheap silicon that can sit idle a big majority of the time.
Yes, germany is already doing that with electric cars. I have a Wallbox in our garage, with seperate electric because it is sadly 300 meters away from our house. So I can't use our solar. However this connection is terminated via GSM when many people are using the grid. This is usually around morning and evening. If the grid isn't exhausted they will turn the electricity back on. I really like this approach. It works well.
It would be nice, if this would be mandatory for big official mining operations. Pretty sure they would just move somewhere else but still.
Unless your “new heating system” is a euphemism for a gpu array, you’re being pretty dishonest here.
Mining takes energy that is likely created by fossil fuel, that would otherwise be used to some necessary purposes, and burns it.
Unless you are generating green energy yourself, you’re likely hurting the environment.
I’m not saying you need to stop, and I’m not saying mining rigs are the end of the world (lord knows at least they aren’t frivolous airline flights), I’m just saying the previous poster isn’t being rude… it’s a valid point.
I was under the impression that when they said "This is a fraction of the amount I put back into the grid", it implied that they are generating their own electricity to use for this, most likely from solar panels.
This is an assumption though, they could be running a large diesel generator for all we know.
I think anyone involved in a PoW system (holding, mining, spending) is legitimising wasting energy. Even if you're using a sustainable source, others aren't, and the power you're using could have been used elsewhere.
Your personal impact might have been small, but it still takes serious compartmentalization or blissful ignorance to be involved in crypto and profess care for the environment.
My understanding is that Ethereum PoW used traditional GPUs whereas for example Bitcoin uses ASICs - "PoW hardware" is not as interchangeable as you're implying.
RandomX is pretty GPU-hostile. If you have a lot of VRAM, you could theoretically make it work okay, but I don't know of a GPU miner that has any semblance of performance (or perf/watt) that is close to a CPU.
Gotcha, CPUs have been most of my experience with it.
I dabbled with GPUs but it seemed like I'd have to do a lot of clock/voltage tuning to make it worthwhile. This was way before energy prices jumping, too
There are lots of other coins that still use GPUs to mine, though. I imagine most people who are running profitable operations will switch coins. Hopefully the popular coins will switch to PoS and the mining operations cease their profitability and shut down.
There are a 1000 other coins using GPUs for mining. E.g. "Ethereum Classic". Miners will switch to these. There are ETH ASICs btw, they just aren't as dominant as BTC AntMiner ASICs.
It is only worth it though if the shitcoin is worth more than the cost of electricity used to generate it. At the moment and for many miners, that just won’t be the case.
Most shit pins probably have few miners, and are pretty susceptible to market manipulation. I large influx of miners across the market could dramatically change the price.
Also, many miners are already using software that automatically changes their hardware to target whatever coin has the most profitability. It’s expected that this will continue just without ETH
They've actually forked Ethereum to keep the original mined version, ETHPoW ($ETHW). They'll keep mining on the original PoW chain as long as it remains profitable.
I'd expect the value of ETHW to crash fairly rapidly, though, because there are not many buyers interested in buying into a deprecated chain without official support or ecosystem buy-in, and lots of sellers who need to sell their mined ETHW to fund mining operations. Then we'll see miners shut off and leave the network, as the mining rewards can no longer support the electricity costs of mining. At some point it might get 51%'d, but at that point nobody will care.
With the price of ETHW currently at $22.80 and the price of ETH at $1500, I can’t imagine mining ETHW would even cover the electric bill. It’s also not clear to me what advantages ETHW would over ETC which is about $37 ea.
Previously ETC was often used as a lower cost dev-testing server for ETH applications that might not be ready for the main-net.
With ETH off there’s going to be a significant loss of profit to be had and people stopping because the expected value of mining has gone negative. Store stocks of graphics cards are booming. There absolutely will be a reduction in PoW power usage globally.
Maybe. What are they gonna move to though? If everyone moves to some other coin (not Bitcoin, because that's different hardware), it'll quickly become unprofitable to mine. They'll just sell their hardware, most likely. Hopefully.
Well, there are options. I do not want to point to obvious candidates, because I am biased and it could easily be misconstrued, but RVN just just saw a decent influx of those ETH miners based on recent spike.
Life hates vacuum. Short of outright ban, nothing will change in that space.
I will admit that it is hard for me to make a good prediction here. I ridiculous amount of it boils down to psychology and perception and not any kind of fundamentals. The following statement can be true in some instances, but I am not sure if it is true across the board.
I just hope the PoW markets collapse now ETH is moving on.