What is up with everyone in this thread acting like ETH is the only mineable coin? There are a shitload of other algos out there. Unless you are using old AMD cards, mining ETH hasn't been the most profitable coin to mine in almost a year. Blows my mind how people act like the sky is falling and its the end of mining because Bitmain is releasing an "ASIC" that is underpowered and overpriced and not even available for 3 months.
What is up with you and your head in the clouds not realizing that ETH is the main source of income of GPUs both directly and indirectly. Yes, its not the most profitable coin to mine but its what FARMS mine for a steady source of income. If ETH tanks all those mining farms will eat up your little GPU rigs and nothing will be profitable. You are a little fish who is lost in a big sea of miners.
There are other coins that are at any given time as profitable or more profitable than ETH. I stopped mining ETH a long time ago. The writing has been on the wall that ETH mining is over for a long time between threats of Asics and Proof of Stake forks being threatened for a long time.
What he is telling you is that the Farms will turn to mine your now profitable coins, hashrate will explode and profit will be peanuts.
So its not that there are other profitable coins out there, of course there are, its that if ETH rigs move to other coins then those coins profit will fall drastically.
Maybe so, but that is mining. Plus there are lots of other coins and I don't see the hashrate all moving to one coin. There are enough to spread the hashrate among the other coins. Plus a lot of miners will just sell their rigs and get out of mining, reducing the overall hashrate on all coins.
Very untrue, I made a calculation a while back so numbers are a bit off but it paints a (dark) picture:
If we simplify all GPU's to the hashrate of a GTX1070 (wrong, I know, but just for creating an estimation) then;
-There's about 9.5 million GPU's mining in the world of which
-~8 million are mining ETH
-~1 million are mining ZCash
-~0.36 million are mining ZCL
-~0.33 million are mining ETC
and it quickly goes down from there. This means that ~85% of the GPU's that are mining worldwide are being used to mine Ethash.
When profitability goes down as difficulty rises, more and more mines will look for new coins to mine, there's simply not enough coins that have enough liquidity and perceived market value to keep GPU mining profitable. Lots of mines will go bust, some that have very low power cost and overhead will stay profitable for a while. Expect lots of second hand GPU's soon.
The numbers are from 2 months ago but they are probably a better representation as Bitmain keeps adding hashrate on Ethash, which skews the numbers more and more.
Hard fork? What if they are indeed using gpu chips? There no solution except for cpu-only algo's but that gets destroyed by people abusing AWS instances and botnets etc.
