If you are a miner in Ethereum like i'm, it would have been a heavy blow to you watching that the hash rates are dropping. And that it has become one of the top stories in internet today panicking the miners as depicted below.
The primary reason for the crash has been mentioned by the exchange's vice-president Adam White as, "On Wednesday afternoon, a "multimillion dollar" sell order was placed on the GDAX exchange for the digital currency ethereum. That triggered a chain of events that resulted in ethereum briefly plunging to 10 cents on the exchange". Perhaps, this one blow has come out as an alert to us, the miners. It also has shook the confidence of investors and i guess it might be a not so easy task to attract sizeable investors in the near future. It has taught us some very important lessons which is hard yet it is a need to digest at the hour.
Buyers - Beware! The price of digital currency dropped from greater than $300 to 10 cents on Wednesday on one exchange. The crash shows how it suffers handling large trades.
Big Wall Street firms have increased their interest in digital currencies and their underlying blockchain technology.
For a little bit of facts about the same, Hash rate drop is nothing new for miners and it is usually due to growing DAG (directed acyclic graph) file size. Ethereum DAG, being the key component for the proof of work algorithm, is generated for every 30,000 blocks.
It's high time for us. There are chances that the Ethereum prices might go up, and it's better to sell our rigs. It's upon quick notice that Ethereum Prices are under heavy pressure against US Dollars and Bitcoins. There is a chance of ETH/USD retesting $300 in a shorter span. Due to growing DAG file size, for Radeon RX400/RX500 series of GPUs with 4/8GB VRAM are expected to be dropping in terms of mining hash rate for Ethereum in the next couple of months. About 30% decrease from current hash rate has been expected. Other more powerful GPUs - R9 290(x)/390(x) , Nvidia Pascal GPU's with greater video memory (6GB/8GB+) will probably not be affected or the drop in performance is expected to be much smaller. A much detailed analysis has been depicted in the below graph.
As far as the severity is considered, one best conclusion could be that more powerful the GPU is, having greater video memory, the more likely it is to handle better long term mining Ethereum. To overcome from this downfall, Let us Keep calm and wait for high tides.