When we started putting this video together, GPU prices were still pretty high, but the supply
situation was starting to get just a little bit better. So does that mean that NVIDIA and AMD
have found a way to make more chips? Not exactly. It turns out prices were gently dropping because
of miners trying to liquidate their stock of GPUs. In fact, over in China, used graphics
cards were practically flooding the market. I mean, think about how insane it is these days
to get a 3070 for 400 bucks. You see, Ethereum is currently the most popular cryptocurrency that
people are mining on graphics cards because unlike Bitcoin, it's still often profitable to do so.
But similarly to Bitcoin, the difficulty of mining Ether is gradually getting harder and harder,
meaning you get less of a payout for the same amount of computational power your GPU expends.
This is all leading up to the launch of Ethereum 2.0, which won't rely on GPU mining at all.
Or any mining. And yes, although we already have had the London hard fork, which some people believed
would cause GPU prices to fall, we haven't gotten the full Ethereum 2.0 release just yet.
The current Ethereum uses a consensus mechanism called Proof of Work, where you get rewarded
because your system expended energy working on a cryptographic problem. But Ethereum 2.0 will scrap
Proof of Work entirely and instead move to Proof of Stake. But don't worry if you're vegan,
as there's no red meat involved. Proof of Stake means that Ethereum rewards
won't be decided by how good of a GPU or ASIC miner you have. Instead, you'll need to already
have some Ether on the network. Staked on the network. This is the stake in Proof of Stake.
The more Ether you have staked, the higher the probability of being assigned
transactions to validate and the higher the amount of cryptocurrency you'll ultimately get paid.
Of course, this means you'll have to keep some Ether on the network instead of just selling it for
real money, but you're just holding it all anyway, right? Now, this might sound not too great if you
don't already have a fair amount of Ether saved up, but you can still grow how much you have over
time with Proof of Stake. Even though the official amount needed to stake is 32 Ether, around $125,000
US at the time we wrote this video, you should still be able to join a pool with far less crypto
on hand, similarly how current mining pools work. We're all in this together. But why is Ethereum
moving to Proof of Stake? Well, one big concern is the environmental impact of the current Proof
of Work scheme. As you know, mining crypto on GPUs or ASICs is an incredibly power-hungry process,
and taking the vast majority of the number crunching out of the equation, no pun intended,
will go a long way toward a cleaner future for crypto. Another huge advantage is speed. Getting
rid of Ethereum's dependence on Proof of Work means transactions can be processed much more
quickly. Instead of its current rate of approximately 15 to 30 transactions every second,
we could instead see numbers closer to 2,000 to 100,000 transactions per second, which
may give Ethereum more appeal as a mainstream blockchain protocol. ThroughPit will also be
helped along by a technique called sharding, where each computer doesn't have to hold a copy of the
entire blockchain. Sharding with a D, guys. But when can we expect Ethereum 2.0 to replace the
current system? Well, reports are indicating that it could happen by late 2021 or early 2022,
so be on the lookout for this if you're a miner, or even if you don't care at all about crypto,
and just want to play some games. Hopefully there will be actually an affordable used graphics card
under your Christopher Shiori and your Easter basket as miners offload them. I'm assuming they
don't just find something else to mine. Maybe this is a good time for us to launch Linus coin?
So thanks for watching, guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in
the comment section with your suggestions of videos and topics that we should cover in the future.