The life and death situation of Ethereum miners: 4G graphics card mining machines may be wiped out in the fourth quarter

特邀专栏作者

2020-02-27 17:40 (UTC+8)

This article is about 2545 words, reading the full article takes about 4 minutes

Ethereum has not been halved, but in August this year, it is very likely that the GPU miners of Ethereum will surrender, and more than 50% of the computing power of the entire network may withdraw from the Ethereum network.

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Editor's Note: This article comes fromBabbitt Information (ID: bitcoin8btc), author: Wang Jiajian, published with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Babbitt Information (ID: bitcoin8btc)

, author: Wang Jiajian, published with authorization.

Bitcoin is halved, and everyone is panicking. Some people say that this may cause the largest mining disaster in history.

The sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of GPU miners is the Ethereum DAG file that is about to approach 4G, which means that 4G graphics cards are likely to be wiped out.

This is not alarmist. Just these two days, 2Miners mine pool was exposed. In February, Bitmain’s Antminer E3, once the strongest Ethereum Asic mining machine, its mining efficiency on ETC dropped by about 80% %, from 180 MH/s to 30 MH/s. They predict that ETH will not be able to be mined in April E3.

2Miners believes that the problem of E3 may be related to DAG, because the graphics card of E3 is only 4GB.

What are DAGs? Why is it a nightmare for GPU miners? Where will these obsolete GPU mining machines go? Will Ethereum be in danger due to the collapse of computing power? Who will benefit from it? Let's take a look together.

What the hell is a DAG file?

In June 2016, Ethereum adopted this design in algorithm optimization. Since then, this DAG file has continued to grow at a rate of about 520M per year, and by December 2020, the file is expected to reach 4G.

Ethereum's consensus algorithm is called Ethash, which is very similar to Bitcoin's POW algorithm. Miners need to constantly search for random numbers to obtain mining rights.

According to Shi Haihong, a developer of the MATPool mining pool, unlike Bitcoin, which emphasizes the computing power of mining machines, the Ethash algorithm consumes a lot of graphics card memory and is a memory-hard algorithm. Specifically, the Ethash algorithm requires the verification information of the new block to contain the encrypted information of all previous blocks. This is the DAG file (DAG is also called a directed acyclic graph), and this file needs to be stored in the video memory during mining.

Taking the A10 as an example, the machine has a low energy consumption ratio, but the price is not low. One can be worth three graphics card machines. Some miners think that the cost performance is not high. Moreover, its mining efficiency is not very prominent compared with GPU mining machines. So today Ethereum mining is dominated by GPUs.

But the DAG file has a side effect, that is, once the video memory is lower than 4G, these graphics cards cannot continue to mine Ethereum, nor can they mine Ethereum Classic ETC.

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▲Ethereum DAG file growth schedule, source: investoon.com

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4G graphics card will wipe out the whole army? Ethereum computing power may drop by 50%

According to the investoon.com website, currently, the Ethereum DAG file is 3.48G, and the Ethereum Classic is 3.56G. Calculation can be known. On December 25, 2020, the Ethereum DAG will reach 3.99G. This means that the GTX1050TI 4GB graphics card cannot be mined.

But the problem may be more urgent, because the video memory of the 4G graphics card is actually less than 4G, and the system also takes up space.

Song Xuejian is a big Ethereum miner and the CMO of the cloud computing power platform. He is currently mining Ethereum in the MATPool mining pool. He said that in August 2020, 4G graphics cards will encounter situations where they cannot mine. The 4G graphics card currently exceeds 60% of the total computing power of Ethereum. This batch of graphics cards is the main graphics card mining machine that entered the mining market in 2017-2018.

Does this mean that these graphics cards will all be withdrawn from the market? maybe. Song Xuejian introduced. Miners have 2 ways to extend their working hours.

First, switch systems. Switch the mining machine from the Windows system to the Linux system, and the Linux system has a lower occupancy rate for the graphics card. The problem is that there are no tests to show that it works. Moreover, there are 500,000 4G graphics card mining machines, and the project is huge.

Second, refit. Expand 4G video memory to 5G, 6G or 8G, but the modification cost is hundreds of yuan per card. It depends on the currency price of Ethereum at that time to determine whether it is a good deal.

If the above plan is not feasible, then there will be a place for these graphics cards to become game cards and enter the second-hand market.

At present, Song Xuejian said that they have already made preparations, but what to do at that time still depends on the price of Ethereum.

Prior to this, Qiu Xiaodong from Xinghuo Mining Pool said that for graphics card miners, it is still necessary to upgrade the mining machine, that is, to upgrade the graphics card with 4G video memory to 6G or 8G video memory.

That's what Song Xuejian did, and the process has already started. But even so, the 4G graphics card mining machine in his hand still accounts for more than 50%.

Sadly, in the fourth quarter of this year, most of those miners who have 4G mining machines will definitely leave Ethereum.

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Is Ethereum in danger? The Rise of Small Currencies?

Will this foreseeable drop in hashrate put both chains in jeopardy? Most likely not. To a large extent, a 51% attack is not a question of whether it can be done, but whether it is profitable. In the currency circle, no one should have the ability to attack Ethereum. And if it is placed outside the circle, there is a high probability that there will be no computing power giants to do this business.

So, if these 4G graphics cards continue to stay in the currency circle, will they flow to those small currencies?https://matpool.io/）

Qiu Xiaodong believes that finding alternative currencies and allowing potential POW currencies to undertake a large amount of ETH graphics card computing power is a top priority for miners in addition to upgrading their mining machines.

Which small currencies have this capability? According to the data provided by the official website of the MATPool mining pool, it can support 18 GPU currency mining, including Grin, BEAM, CKB, RVN, XMR, BTG, AION, etc. This is a relatively well-known currency, and more unknown small currencies can also be mined with GPUs.

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▲MATPool mining pool shows the ranking of GPU mining revenue (

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