Ethereum mining may be going down the drain sooner than expected. With the first testnet for Ethereum 2.0 already live, and the final merger expected to take place in the next 6-12 months, miners have a lot to worry about. The time required to break even has grown to a rather significant 20+ months for most GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs. As the number of miners connected to the Etherum network grows, the difficulty (time taken to mine a coin) has also increased. Recently, the computing power of the network exceeded a staggering 1,000 TH/s, pushing the difficulty to an all-time high of 12.09P.
As the number of miners on the network (and the mining difficulty) increases, the income of each individual miner drops by a notch. This is exacerbated by the fact that crypto-whales have started dumping their wallets onto the market, causing a further drop in the value of Ether, and therefore, the income of miners.
Cryptocurrency enthusiast and miner ProTON has shared the hash rates of various contemporary graphics cards, including the GeForce RTX 30 series and the Radeon RX 6000 lineup. Going by these numbers, it can be seen that Ether’s profitability has fallen off a cliff.
Even with a top-end graphics card such as the RTX 3080/3090, it’ll take you up to 22 months to break even and just start earning profits. If you’re just starting off, then there’s a very good chance that by the time you start pulling in profits, the Ethereum 2.0 network will be up and live. Of course, there are other currencies out there such as Raven and Cuckatoo, but they still aren’t quite as prominent and popular as Ether.
