One of the interesting things about open blockchains is that, in theory, anyone can set their computers to focus on these cryptographic puzzles as a way to win rewards.
The catch is that mining on major public blockchains tends to require more and more power over time, as more people invest in more powerful hardware.
In this day and age, those mining with low-powered setups on their own officially have zero chance to turn in any profit as the latest research from Susquehanna shows.
As CNBC writes, the profit per month of mining ethereum using a graphics card called a GPU is down from about $150 last summer, to an estimated $0 for November of this year, according to analysis by Susquehanna.
Miners have their machines running all the time doing the operation of hashing.
Hashing is a mathematical process that takes various input data and performs a complicated operation on it, after which it releases the result of the operation as a fixed-size output data. The size of input data (which is also called a string or a message) doesn’t matter, however the returned output (also called a digest) will always be of a fixed length.
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The “hashrate” or speed at which a computer can complete that operation sunk dramatically for ethereum this year. A higher hashrate is better for miners and adds to the opportunity of finding the next “block” and therefore getting the reward of new cryptocurrency.
NVIDIA sales numbers reeling
Chipmaker Nvidia is losing sales as a result. The company’s crypto-related revenue is down roughly $100 million quarter over quarter, Rolland said. He predicted that the company’s cryptocurrency-related revenue will be “likely close to zero” in its third-quarter report out Thursday.
“We estimate very little revenue from crypto-related GPU sales in the quarter, consistent with management’s prior commentary that they were including no contribution from crypto in their C3Q18 outlook,” Rolland said. “3Q18 mining profitability continued to decline, as Ethereum prices have fallen more than -70% since the beginning of 2018.”
Ethereum price extended losses against the US Dollar and bitcoin. ETH/USD could continue to move down towards the $200 or $198 support level.
