The intense competition among GPU miners leaves Ethereum leaving little profit for other blockchains. As many as 20%-30% of miners have stopped operating altogether, it is believed.
As the market for blockchains is fierce, miners are looking for new ones in the wake Ethereum’s Merge.
Many of the miners who supported Ethereum’s second largest blockchain network, ETC and RVN are now moving to other PoW networks.
However, the enthusiastic embrace of new miners to these networks has led to a rise in block difficulties that is making it difficult to make a profit for GPU miners at present market conditions and energy prices, according to Ben Gagnon chief mining officer at Bitfarms (BITF).
Gagnon tweeted: “GPU #mining dead less than 24hrs after the #merge.” He also stated that the three largest mining chains offer negligible profits, and that the only coins that show profit “have no marketcap or liquidity.
As hashrates increase, miners see a decrease in profits
Profit among rival miners has lowered potential rewards as the hash difficulty of networks such as ETC and RVN keeps rising. ETC block rewards dropped from an average 24 hour of just 58 cents to just under 1 cent. Rewards for blocks on RVN decreased from a 24-hour average of $1.77 down to just over 4 cents, according to minerstat data.
Tweeted Ethan Vera (COO of Luxor), “Even running new-generation hardware at sub-3 cent power isn’t profitable on ETC now,” .
Vera reports that miners who don’t have a profitable mining network shut down between 20% and 30% of their operations.
Vera had previously calculated that miners would contribute around 100 terahash per minute to the Ethereum network. She also cited the need for high-quality hardware and low electricity costs to stay competitive.
It seems that even the most modern hardware and low-rate energy costs are not enough to make a profit on networks such as ETC. There has been a 280% increase in hash rate over the past 24 hours.
