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 30-70 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
competitional power your GPU expense 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 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 2000 to 100 000 transactions per second which
may give ethereum more appeal as a mainstream blockchain protocol
throughput will also be helped along by a technique called sharding oops 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 christmas tree in 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 this Linus coin big
thanks to brilliant for sponsoring this video brilliant is a website and app
that makes learning accessible and fun it uses active learning with problem
solving and interactive visual concepts there's no grades there's no long
lectures or strict time limits they do offer over 60 courses on everything from
astronomy to programming with python one of the courses that we suggest is the
calculus in a nutshell course you'll get a clear sense of the major pillars of
calculus limits derivatives integrals and infinite sums with new sections that
are more interactive than ever so join the community of over 8 million learners
and educators today the first 200 people who head to brilliant.org techwiki will
get 20 off an annual premium subscription so thanks for watching guys
if you like 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