Ether miners use tools after the merge

Ether crypto-miner try to reuse the technology that is out of date by the “merge” of the last month, which may be reduced, reducing the efforts of the crypto project to reduce its CO2 footprint.

companies and small investors who have lost after the success of the merger turn to the mine of other cryptocurrencies, Hosten services in the cloud and even heat their houses to use their devices.

The Merge, one of the most ambitious projects in crypto history, changed the operation and maintenance of the popular Ethereum blockchain by overrun from a "proof-of-work" system to a system that is known as the "proof of stake".

This change has the amount of energy that is needed to reduce new ether tokens and to conduct the main register that pursues all Ethereum transactions drastically. Co -founder Vitalik butterin claims The changeover would reduce the global electricity consumption by 0.2 percent.

But this has meant that many investors have bet against the merger with stacks of redundant IT equipment. Many try to convert their energy -intensive machines for other computer services. Ether miners use technologies that contain graphics processing units that are more adaptable.

Large companies such as Hut 8 Mining and Hive Blockchain Technologies have announced that it turns to cloud computing. "Tracking the consequences of the merger becomes worse if you consider that graphics cards are also used outside of mining, such as cloud computing, AI and games," said Alex de Vries, founder of the cryptoanalysis website digiconomist. "It could be almost impossible to follow it."

Many Ether miners were normal consumers because they used less electricity than Bitcoin. "There is a huge retail base in Ethereum mining because it is much easier to operate a GPU in your house than a Bitcoin mining machine," said Ethan Vera, Chief Operating Officer from Luxor Technologies, a mining and analysis company.

Chris Kyle, marketing director at Flexpool, a common crypto mining group, plans to use its 86 GPUs to heat his house in Vancouver. The units are approximately the size of a computer keyboard, and the graphics card temperatures can be between 40 ° C and 90 ° C.

"Now that it gets cold, I will switch it on again. The entire energy that you put in it is converted into heat, so it makes sense to only operate my GPU instead of switching on the heating."

Some exague other energy -intensive cryptocurrencies. Around a fifth of computing power, which was spent on the mining of the old Ethereum blockchain, was switched to alternative coins such as Ethereum Classic, Ravencoin and Ergo

The influx of new miners, however, tightened the competition and put an industry under pressure that has already struggled with high energy costs. "It is extremely unlikely that the mining of these coins is still profitable because the margins are extremely compressed," said James Check, a senior analyst at Glassnode, a blockchain data and intelligence company.

Others are waiting for a price increase. Jon Hartwig, a manufacturing engineer from Iowa, spends his evenings and weekends with dusting and checking the cabling of his 600 GPUs.

"Many miners hold onto their equipment.. I will sit on it and wait for the next thing to come," he said.

Mark d’Aria, Managing Director of Bitpro Consulting, which resold used mining equipment, said the volume of the GPUs sold on the platform had risen by 30 percent since the merger, and the prices did not "like as much as I would like to think".

"Selling more people.. But after these first two weeks it slowed down.