Ethereum cryptocurrency miners spent about $15 billion on graphics cards in a year and a half. This amount does not include the costs they paid for the CPUs, motherboards, power supplies, and other components needed to build a mining setup.
The data comes from Bitpro Consulting, a company specializing in purchasing and renewing crypto hardware. We’ve seen a significant rise in cryptocurrencies in 2020, causing many people to purchase video cards to mine Ethereum, among other things. At the same time, Nvidia and AMD released next-gen GPUs that were much faster than their predecessors, so gamers also wanted to buy new hardware.
According to research by Jon Peddie Research, the average price of a dedicated GPU has increased from $400 to nearly $800 from 2019 to last year.
Crypto Crash
Early investors were able to make a lot of money. However, Ethereum has fallen sharply since a year ago. The digital currency is worth 42 percent less at the time of writing. Bitcoin is worth 35 percent less and Dogecoin is down as much as 75 percent. Bloomberg reports on a man who invested $30,000 in hardware and still only earned $5,000 in crypto.
Cryptocurrency prices (via BTCDirect.eu)
Ethereum 2.0
The developers behind Ethereum are working to replace the network from one. proof of work-to a model proof of share-model. The project is known as Ethereum 2.0. There will no longer be any need to use buildings full of video cards to confirm transactions. It remains to be seen whether this means that all these useless video cards will go on sale on the second-hand market. Users can start using them to mine other cryptos that work with a proof-of-work model.
Sources: Jon Peddie, Bitpro Consulting, BTCDirect, Ethereum, Bloomberg
Source: Hardware Info
