After a year of development, on July 6, sales of the E9 supercar from Bitmain started. At the same time, back in April, Ethereum developer Tim Beiko strongly recommended not investing in mining due to the approaching transition of the network to proof-of-stake.
Based on technical indicators, the E9 is a top-end device for Ethereum mining and corresponds in power to an assembly of 25 RTX 3080 video cards. Asic outputs 2400 MH/sec at a consumption of 2 kWh. The device generates $39 of income per day, and the exit to self-sufficiency at the current ETH rate comes in 8.5 months. For comparison, RTX 3080 generates only $1.3 per day, and the self-sufficiency period exceeds two years.
At the same time, Ethereum miners receive more income not from block confirmation, but tips from transaction fees. So, in May, they collectively earned a record $231 million per day due to the launch of a new collection and the sale of NFT from Yuga Labs. The Ethereum network cannot process more than 20 transactions per second, which is why users are forced to charge an increased commission so that their transaction is included in the block as early as possible.
Due to the increased revenue from commissions and the potential growth of Ethereum in the future, buying E9 looks like a worthwhile investment, if you do not take into account the approaching transition of the network to the PoS algorithm.
Now miners are responsible for confirming transactions on the network and assembling blocks.
Low bandwidth leads to the fact that during periods of high demand, the commission for users exceeds $ 50. This harms both the expansion of the network and the involvement of new participants, and young crypto projects are increasingly choosing competitors as the base blockchain.
The problem will be solved by switching to PoS, where validators will conduct the assembly of transactions, and the need for miners will disappear. The test network has been developing for several years, and its merger with the main chain is postponed every time. However, there are more and more signs that the move will happen this year. For the same reason, developer Tim Beiko called in April to abandon investments in Ethereum mining.
