Because the Ethereum community's shift to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism drives adoption amongst institutional traders, the costs of graphics processing items (GPUs), generally used to mine cryptocurrencies like Ether (ETH), are in China sunk.
Following the historic Ethereum merge on September fifteenth, the beforehand coveted Nvidia GeForce GPUs have turn out to be considerably cheaper, according to to a report by the South China Morning Publish. Peng, a Chinese language retailer, cited the RTX 3080 for example, as the value of the GPU fell from $1118, or 8,000 yuan, to five,000 yuan in three months.
Miners went on GPU procuring sprees when Bitcoin (BTC) mining in China peaked, in accordance with Peng. However for now, the retailer mentioned nobody buys new computer systems, not to mention new GPUs.
One other retailer named Liu additionally identified that low-end RTX 3080 playing cards from producers like MSI are additionally down round 2,000 yuan in comparison with costs two months in the past. In keeping with Liu, this may very well be closely influenced by the hype across the Ethereum merge.
Not solely the stationary retailers are affected by the decrease demand. On-line procuring platforms Taobao and JD have additionally proven falling GPU costs. RTX 3080 card costs on these web sites have slowly dropped a number of hundred yuan in comparison with their costs three months in the past.
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After the Ethereum merge, the blockchain transitioned from its energy-intensive Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism to the PoS layer referred to as the Beacon Chain. This may substitute miners who used to course of transactions and produce blocks with ecosystem contributors who would use ETH to turn out to be the brand new validators of the community.
In the meantime, a PoW fork referred to as ETHPoW went stay because the merger started. Nevertheless, regardless of its makes an attempt to take care of the PoW consensus, it suffered from technical points upon its launch, inflicting the value of its ETHW token to fall by 65%.
