The long-awaited "merger" event for the Ethereum blockchain is finally happening, and it's a great day for all gamers looking to get their hands on the next-generation Nvidia Lovelace graphics cards (like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090) that we anticipated at the next weeks.
Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin, and it has been particularly troublesome for PC gamers. Cryptocurrency is mined using what is known as a "proof of work," which requires a computer to solve an unsolvable math problem to generate a token.
This problem gets exponentially more difficult as time goes by by design, requiring ever more powerful computers to solve the problem. The solution proposed by the Ethereum miners was to take the best graphics cards on the market for the last two years and use them in mining operations large and small.
Demand for Nvidia Ampere graphics cards in particular was always going to be high after they were released in late 2020, but in fact finding one in stock has been nearly impossible for the past two years as resellers have used bots to buy shares and resell them at inflated prices.
The crypto miners, who were there for Ethereum, apparently agreed to buy these graphics cards at inflated prices, which only fueled the graphics card shortage. Even the best cheap graphics cards were not spared, as five- and six-year-old cards disappeared from store shelves to create a crypto bubble.
Meanwhile, all of this has turned math into carbon emissions at a terrifying rate, and cryptocurrency mining now uses as much energy as a small industrialized country in Europe. This prompted Ethereum to switch to proof-of-stake, which uses a different system to validate blockchain transactions that doesn't require going through algorithms for years.
This is the so-called merger that happened on September 15, and Ethereum is now out of the proof-of-work model. Former Ethereum miners who invested tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in GPU mining now look to other proof-of-work coins to mine, including a fork of the Ethereum blockchain into an entirely different cryptocurrency called Proof-of-Work. of Ethereum, according to Coindesk (opens in a new tab), or ETHW.
In the meantime, Bitcoin, which primarily uses specialized ASICs to mine this cryptocurrency, will continue business as usual and has no plans to transition to the new proof-of-stake system.
Analysis: Will the merger save Nvidia's Lovelace release?
The timing of the Ethereum merger couldn't have come at a better time for PC gamers. In less than a week, we expect the announcement of the Nvidia RTX 4090 and possibly also the Nvidia RTX 4080, and these cards will always be prime targets for crypto miners looking to increase their hashrates.
But aside from Ethereum and Bitcoin, there are simply no other coins that can attract large-scale miners, and the proof, if you will, has been the drop in graphics card prices and the rise in stocks. If proof of work had a real future, these cards would still be purchased as before.
Now things could change obviously and another NFT or decentralized finance project could bloom like tulips on a Dutch coast and fuel the next bubble, but with our current economic environment, inflation and an energy crisis, it's unlikely to happen in A near future. . This removes a major buyer from the graphics card market for the next generation of graphics cards, so even if these cards sell out immediately, gamers have a much better chance of getting one this time.