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Comment by ikornaselur | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this well enough, but, why can't miners just mine other coins? Was all GPU mining Etherium based?

I know that bitcoin mining requires ASICS and GPUS can't compete with that, but I just assumed miners are just mining one of many possible coins, with Etherium being one of them.

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If 80% of the revenue was from Ethereum, and now that part disappeared, 100% of the miners are left fighting over the 20% that's left.

It's be like if all women stopped going to Starbucks tomorrow, and you asked, "Why don't they just sell to the men?" Well they could, but they'd still be down ~50% in revenue.

Imo that's a bit of a failed analogy. More appropriate would be, imagine coffee is something very precious and Starbucks suddenly stopped selling to women. In this case, women need to go to other cafes, increasing their competition over coffee there. But in that case it doesn't seem to be so absurd any more - perhaps it's not the case that the coffee resources are so scarce (just as it's the case with crypto - does 3x miners of some currency mean that each of them makes 3x less? I don't think so). Also, is it true that 80% of revenue was from Ethereum, or it's dummy data?

I don't understand your analogy. Ethereum was paying miners $20 M / day before the merge, and now that money is gone. There's $20 M / day that used to be flowing to miners that no longer is.

No other coins provide the profitability margins that ETH did, so miners can switch to other POW coins, however the will be paying more in electricity than whatever crypto they are mining.

I would assume the problem is that a lot of alt-coins are built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, and that most of those that aren't are nowhere near as profitable to mine.

Tokens on top of Ethereum generally are not mined at all. Ethereum provides the consensus layer for them.

Because of the price of electricity. While there might be other coins, if you now earn less than you spend, it’s better to entirely abandon.

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