The second most popular cryptocurrency in the world is preparing for big changes, but the miners are not giving up and it seems that they will dig up coins until the last moment in order to return the investment and earn something over it.
According to the latest indicators, it seems that Ethereum mining will become unprofitable long before this network switches to a new generation of blockchain – Ethereum 2.0.
To remind you, the Ethereum 2.0 test network was recently launched, and the final connection is expected to happen in the next 6 to 12 months(according to previous experience, 12 months is more realistic).
What few expected was that the miners would encounter new problems long before that.
With the rise in the price of Ethereum coins, the number of miners who want to grab a few more cakes has increased, while it is still possible.
Unfortunately, with the increase in the number of miners and the increasing power of the network, the difficulty of digging increases, ie the profitability decreases, so now instead of the average 6 to 10 months it takes to pay for your machines, now it takes over 20 months if you bought some RTX 30 series graphics.
With an increasing number of miners, the total power of the network recently exceeded an incredible 1,000 TH/s, raising the mining difficulty to 12.09P, which is the highest mining difficulty ever.
This also means that the earnings of an individual miner are now lower than they were.
Add to that the fact that big players have recently started selling Ether en masse, reducing its price, and thus the direct earnings of crypto-miners.
One of the popular Russian crypto miners, ProTON, recently published a list of popular graphics cards, including the NVIDIA RTX 30 and AMD RX 6000 series, which show that profitability has dropped drastically.
Even the strongest NVIDIA graphics such as the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 return the initial investment in 22 months, which is too long, especially if you have recently joined mining.
On the other hand, you should keep in mind that although it is currently the most profitable, Ethereum is not the only cryptocurrency worth mining, so you should pay attention to other coins that can bring nice profits, especially if you start mining them now while everyone is on Ethereum blockchain.