Ethereum miners have spent $15 billion on GPUs over the past year and a half, with that figure being higher when considering other parts like CPUs, PSUs and chassis.
The report originally comes from analysts at Bitpro Consulting, who Bloomberg reported and our friends in Tom’s Hardware identified. It appears that Ethereum miners may have depleted around 10% of the total GPU supply during the last couple of years’ cryptocurrency bubble.
This explosion in mining and the resulting GPU backlog coincided with demand from players, which helped fuel the sharp rise in prices. On average, a GPU cost $1,056 per unit in 2021, compared to a third of that price in 2019. GPU sales totaled about $51.8 billion for all of 2021, according to data from JPR.
And while Ethereum mining was profitable at one point, reaching its highs around mid 2021its value has dropped by 70% this year, which bodes ill for a latecomer to mining.
Analysis: The Effects of Ethereum Mining and Beyond
Considering that even at its highs, Ethereum was becoming very slower and more expensive thanks to almost reaching your daily transaction limit.
But now, with its value tanking, many crypto investors have found themselves unable to recoup the losses of spending so much money on GPUs and other parts. One such story, as described in the Bloomberg article, has a man who invested $30,000 in cryptomining hardware in mid-2021, but has only made about $5,000 so far from cryptocurrencies.
This is without considering the environmental impact of all this mining, as the level of carbon emissions has always been a big issue with cryptocurrencies. And it could be argued that between the waste of GPUs purchased for mining coupled with environmental damage, Ethereum’s value alone so steeply declining has rendered all this in vain.
