Topic: Ethereum mining difficult down a LOT (Read 1470 times)

That was my original question. It seems that the graph has considered the decrease in difficulty as a sign of less hashing power.

Just to confirm - the block reward, with the recent ETH fork, dropped from 5 per block to 3?

It looks like the hash on the network dropped a lot.  So, where did all that GPU mining go?

My two cents. This is a market like any other: offer and demand meet and form a price. In this case, it is a market with very small obstacles to the entry of producers (miners).

PoW

The demand for ethereum is driven, unfortunately, by speculation and news not (at the moment) by real use as store of value, commerce vehicle /payment method nor per the utility to execute smart contracts. As anything speculative, DEMAND WILL MOVE BY NEWS (adoption, bans, projects, posibility to pay in stores, competing alternatives, expectations of increase in value...)

The offer of Ethereum is fixed at 3 EHT per block, that is whatever per minute. Miners go in or out the market if the price makes operations profitable, so OFFER IS DRIVEN BY PRODUCTION COST, particular cost and availability of graphics cards and also electricity prices.

Thus, exceptional good news or investment may TEMPORARELY drive the price up, but it will be soon be back to "normal" as more people enter the mining attracted by these prices until is no longer really profitable.

PoS

Once it becomes PoS, the production cost instead of being driven by electricity and hardware will be driven by the cost of staking Ethereum. This cost becomes minimally related to hardware and electricity and very related to the cost of money (interests).

The "producers" (stakers) will chose among buying ethereum to stake it and earn "interests" by minting Ether or chose to have other criptos or fiats or bonds or shares that allow obtaining interests or dividends. Therefore, ETH will be just like any share of a company as far as offer is concerned.

And, as with any share, price will be driven by speculation about the use of the network, real transactions, etc.. and by the attractiveness of the "interest rates"  of staking Ether vs the interest rates of Euro, Ruble, Dolar or whatever you chose.

So, my two cents are:

- Price will change from being hardware and electricity related to the opportunity cost of alternative investments in the market.
- As the yield or interest is related to the use of the network, the price will become much more related to new, speculation and in the long term, mainstream adoption as with any startup.

WILL THE PRICE RISE??? It will depend on the real applications in the long term.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO ME? That when PoS comes into effect you are efectively a shareholder of the Ethereum network Help it grow, promote it and be active and we will all profit from it (think of Apple).


Does this make sense?

Indeed it did. My small 5 card rig will finally pay it’s first ethpool payout around christmas.. wohooo

Went from like .11 ETH to .13 ETH per day so yeah it did increase.

hehe

I'm now getting paid more often, stale shares did not increase much.

too many reasons for this, did you check your stale shares?

Then why did the payout time on ethermine reduce by ~25% or so ?  I get .05 shares every 15 hours instead of the 20 before the fork.

there is a minor increase in profit.

There is no increase in profit at all, you are blind to the truth.

As a result of the update on October 16, the block time was reduced by a factor of 2, which led to a doubling of the difficult.

It has changed for the better, roughly 25% or so.

I do not need moral support nor preaching, just technical views. I would hire a professional for the former.

I'm not mining directly. I'm using the nicehash pool. I get there and immediately change Ethereum on bitcoin. So I don't follow the price of Ethereum. But I can say for sure that the income from mining in dollars does not change. The higher the price the less bitcoin mined coins but the result is not changed. Only in case if the price goes down we can lose income. In such periods it is better to exchange the coins for Fiat.

Have I missing something?
I am mining also and seen increase. I was thinking that we'll get lower profit because block rewards will be 3 ETH instead of 5. But it seems to be better

It may happen anything dude. Ethereum difficulty chart completely falls down in the graph. I don't know whether you checked it or not. Yesterday bitcoin's value bumped more and now it is settled around 6100 USD, but the Ethereum cost floats down to 287 USD in the chart. Henceforth, we cannot speculate the cost of ethereum until we see the real price at that time. You have to wait till upcoming fork day.

Thanks for the clarity. I think bitcoin gold may have effect on Ethereum, but I think the Eth project at the moment has a strong community and some big whales behind.

Do you think that there will be dumping?

I do not fear much, I believe in crypto long term and along with mining I also invest. I do not know what effect will have PoS on Ethereum ... either is cheap to produce and therefore price lowers OR there is more demand as the network fees are lower and the price increases.

It is unclear to me frankly... any hint?

It's because of the fork. At the day of the fork when the difficulty lowered itself I nearly doubled my ETH income but later that day the reward was lowered from 5 to 3eth per block. It still made a positive uptrend towards ETH/month ratio by 15%. And right now as ETH price is driven down thanks to the Bitcoin Gold, our ETH profits still increase. This is the season to mine ETH!

It's the result of Byz fork. Block time 30s -> 14s and block rewards 5ETH -> 3ETH.
It made 15%-20% increase in ethereum mining profit.