I dont believe the potential for Dagger-hashimoto ASICs are the driving factor here. I think it has more to do with the fact that a mining rig that would have been making somewhere in the realm of 13-20 dollars a day this time last year is now only making roughly 4 dollars, because of increases in difficulty and decreases in price.
@dot404
dagger-hashimoto (eth) and cryptonight (xmr, aeon, and so on) were both developed to ASIC resistant. As was Scrypt (ltc). When the coins were only worth a few tens of millions, that was one thing. But once a market develops into a multi-billion dollar one, the incentives for development change, and even if the algorithm is difficult to produce specialized machines for there is a much larger incentive to do so.
@Azulath
This is mostly right. Most developers are against it because it encourages centralization due to the higher cost of entry, which works against the intent of most crypto. However, many miners are also against it. An ASIC can only mine one coin, if that goes under then there is suddenly no market to resell equipment and it’s a complete loss. However, with GPU, one can switch to another coin. Beyond that, the cards can also be sold to gamers, which explains why all the mining specific cards have failed, no resale value.
ETH will switch to POS at some point, yes. But no one knows when. Believing in a few months is a pipe dream, especially given the rate of development so far. That could have been a solution last year, but given that there are many alternatives now, and that a good number of cards sold dont even mine eth (1070, 1080, 1080ti, v56, v64 all dont), it isnt the absolute moment GPUs will get cheap again. The cards that are used to mine eth (mostly 580/480, 570/470, and 1060s) are also fairly efficient using other algorithms as well (cryptonight for AMD and equihash for nvidia)
The fact of the matter is as well that a good number of people also believe firmly that the market will recover, and that it will make them millionaires. Because of this even if they’re barely breaking even they’ll continue to mine. Something else to consider is that even though mining is getting close to a zero sum game here in the states and Europe and other places, in places such as China, Mongolia, etc. power costs are far lower, meaning that mining is still far more profitable than here. Combine this with the cult like mentality of the HODL’ers and there is still plenty to prevent the selling price of new GPU to go down. However, there should be plenty of smaller operations shutting down and offloading cards, which could invigorate the used market. I’ve seen a number of deals around Chicago that 1 month ago never would have been posted. Still above what I want to pay, and above MSRP for used, but much much much closer to reason that I’ve seen in months.
Beyond the crypto aspect, the global memory shortage has taken its toll as well. Even if the demand from crypto slows, the memory shortage will still increase prices. IIRC this is supposed to last until at least the thrid quarter, and probably after that. So expect a 20-50 dollar increase over MSRP until that is resolved as well.
My two cents as someone who has mined for 5 years and lives with a trader for a roommate.
