There has been a lot of talking about Bitcoin mining as of late, me included. But I have not really seen a lot of talk about Ethereum mining. So I thought we would take a look at that and see how it is fairing.
Ethereum hashrate and the state of miners
Currently, the total mining hash rate for the Ethereum network is holding pretty steady at around 870 terra hash per second. It has been holding fairly steady since around the middle of Jun. Steady but slightly dropping.
But before that, there was a huge drop of over 10% having power in only a few days. And if we take a look at the price charts for Ethereum we'll see that this correlates with a big drop in price that occurred then. Ethereum went from around $1800 to just over $1000.
This would indicate that a lot of miners have turned off their riggs and GPUs. With such a high drop in price, it would be sure to break havoc on the profitability of mining. Especially if you are running older or less efficient GPUs.
RTX 2080, last-gen top of the line GPU
And if we add on the recent reports of electrical prices increasing. It paints an even darker picture for Ethereum mining. But then again, the Merged should have happened a long time ago already. We are well into extra time already. And with the recent Ethereum fork where they added on a lot of extra blocks, to hold off on the difficulty increase. These were reported to last until mid-October. But I am not sure if they took into account this new lower "normal" hashrate. That would mean the new blocks could possibly last all through October. Giving the devs plenty of time to make sure The Merge goes smoothly.
But this also means that mining most likely will continue up to mid-October. And if electricity prices keep going up thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine we will probably see even more GPUs and riggs go online. Well unless the bear market ends and the bulls start to run again. But there has been some speculation as to what and when this supposed bull run will start. And there is some speculation that The Merge will be one of the catalysts behind it.
This would meanwhile there is still Etherium mining going on. It is likely to get less and less profitable as time goes on. Especially if you are paying the market price for electricity price. And as I have not really seen any sign of the bull run starting The Merger is looking like a more and more plausible catalyst in my eyes at least.
I hope that you have found this look into Ethereum mining to be interesting and hopefully informative as well. And if you have any thoughts on the subject I would love it if you would share them with us in the comment section down below.
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