The price of ethereum rises by over 48% but miners are still selling their GPUs. Here's why

pcgamer.com:

In the last week alone, the price of Ethereum has risen by over 29%, and in the last month has gone up more than 48%(opens in new tab) from its low $994 on June 20 this year. For everyone super-excited about the collapse of cryptocurrencies, specifically those that have held modern graphics cards hostage for the past two years, that's got to be a concern.

But actually it's possibly not worth getting too worried about the supposed thawing of this crypto winter. There's a good chance that the price of ethereum has been rising to such an extent precisely because it will soon not need those GPUs to function as a digital currency. And by soon we're talking about potentially September 19, 2022.

Even though the price has been spiking recently, the number of miners punishing their graphics cards with the ETH algorithm hasn't gone up at the same level. in fact the global ethereum hash rate(opens in new tab) has effectively stabalised post crash. So yeah, they're still listing their cards on ebay. Or their local equivalent.

The Ethereum Foundation has gone public with an actual proposed date for the ethereum network to turn off the graphics card mines. This is the point where it will switch to a proof of stake (PoS) consensus model as opposed to the current proof of work (PoW) model which demands the use of GPUs to secure the blockchain. This is the same energy-sapping mechanism that bitcoin needs to function, and together the two cryptocurrencies are responsible for carbon emissions of more than 150MT/yr.

Or, the same carbon emissions as a modern, medium-sized country.

The Merge's date was proposed on a consensus developers call, where Ethereum Foundation's Tim Beiko put forward a planning timeline which culminates in a final