Mining companies began to buy specialized chips for mining from Nvidia – Bits Media

Mining company Hut 8 bought chips for cryptocurrency mining (CMP) in Nvidia on $30 million. Will private ETH miners get similar video cards and how much they need them??

According to the press release
Hut 8, the mining company decided to expand its activities for BTC production limits will be mining altcoins, First of all, ETH. For this hut 8 I bought special mining chips from NVIDIA (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) on $30 million. Other industrial miners can follow it.

The supply of cards on these chips is scheduled for May 2021 of the year, And the full deployment on the capacities of the company will occur in the summer. Adding NVIDIA CMP will increase the hut hashrate 8 In the etherium approximately 1.6 Th / s (That's all 0.3% The current hash of the Ethereum). CMP will be used to extract ETH and other altcoins. In February, NVIDIA General Director Kolette Korus (Colette Kress) declared, which predicts the sales volume of CMP in $50 Milln during the first quarter of this year. Only one deal with HUT 8 Provide 60% planned sales.

Last month, Nvidia said, which programmatically limits the hashrate of video cards RTX 3060 and will launch CMP chips for miners. Thus, the company decided to fight a shortage of video cards for gamers, which miners redeem for cryptocurrency mining. When developing CMP, engineers optimized the chip for maximum mining efficiency. The voltage on the chip nuclei is reduced, As well as frequencies, But the cooling is improved. The main feature of the cards – They are deprived of video outputs to reduce the cost of production.

In mid -March, it became known about the start of sales of card from Palit on the NVIDIA CMP 30HX chip, which appeared on sale by the Arab retailer Microless at a price $724 for pike. The effectiveness of this CMP for mining ETH is 26 Mx/s in consumption 125 Tue. This is the youngest of the chips in the line - the CMP 40Hx hashrate has been declared in 36 Mx/s with consumption 185 Tue. Older CMP 50Hx and CMP 90HX will appear on sale by summer. Moreover, CMP is not based on the latest ampere architecture (3000-I am a series), And on the previous turing (2000-I am a series). for instance, CMP 30HX corresponds to the game video card GeForce GTX 1660 Super, а CMP 40HX — RTX 2070. In this way, CMP is lost in terms of energy efficiency of mining cards of the last series, Taking into account not fully realized threats of NVIDIA, cut the hashrate of the latter.

What chips did HUT buy 8, It is still unknown. But obvious, that they got a mining company at a much lower price, Since wholesale deliveries directly from the manufacturer are much cheaper.

Do you need CMP private miners?

Taking into account the large supply of NVIDIA CMP industrial miners, you can expect a deficiency of chips when selling to retail, and their prices can even exceed the cost of full -fledged gaming cards. However, taking into account the current situation in the ETH mining market, Such a deficit can be good for private miners. The deficit will save them from buying cards, which can become illiquid during the year, since the final transition to POS is not such a distant prospect.

The first phase of the Ethereum 2.0 – Beacon Chain was launched
in December last year. The launch of the “signal chain” marks the beginning of the transition of the Ethereum from the algorithm of evidence of the work (PoW) for proof of the share (PoS). According to Consensys developers, The last phase of deployment of full functionality ETH 2.0 – phase 2, will be activated in 2021 or in the first half 2022 of the year. But even before that, the Ethereum network will completely switch to POS and ETH production will go into the past.. After that, a lot of video cards will spill on the market, Since other altcoins will not be able to absorb such a volume of capacities while maintaining acceptable profitability. It turns out, that nvidia with its CMP comes to the market ready to curl up, And their buyers will have to run after an already leaving train.

A similar story has already happened at the end 2018 of the year, When, after a drop in cryptocurrency courses, mining yield barely exceeded the cost of electricity. Compared to the beginning of the year, all video cards fell several times, And to get away specialized mining cards without video outputs has become a problem even at a low price. Gamers buy video cards after mining with great care and ask for a discount, And they do not need cards without video outputs at all. The same fate in a year can be expected by CMP. Will they have time to pay off, if they are bought in retail at high prices?

After the mining in the Ethereum, part of the miners will switch to the extraction of other altcoins, However, while mining, not a single altcoin on profitability can be compared with ETH, And the new promising altcoins on Pow almost stopped appearing. It will be possible to minimize losses by large mining companies due to large volumes and low purchase price. However, private miners when buying CMP need to lay the continuing growth of complexity and the price of their elimination close to zero. Acquired by $700 Video cards may not even pay off by the time the Ethereum transition to POS.

With approaching this day, the secondary market will be flooded with sold private miners video cards. Given the absence of CMP video outputs, Miners lose the main market for used video cards - gamers. They can only be resell them by the optimist miners at a low price.

Now it’s hard to hope, that the final transition to POS will be struck endlessly. Users are also interested in it, and exchanges, And Defi services, tired of high commissions. And the Ethrium "breathe in the back" numerous competitors. Therefore, developers also have to accelerate. Last week Sigma Prime, Lighthouse Ethereum Client Developer, stated
On the first “merger transaction” between Ethereum 1.x and the Ethereum 2.0. In response to the achievement of Lighthouse on Reddit, a discussion of mining and its energy consumption began. The opinion becomes popular, that making a profit from stakeing is easier and more reliable, than from mining.

According to ETH2 Launchpad, Now the validators of the Ethereum 2.0 Get an annual income 8.2%, And for stakeing already blocked 3.6 Milln ETH. However, with the approximation of the merger day and the growth of the number of validators, the income of each of them will fall and will eventually decrease to the planned 2% annual.