The second largest cryptocurrency will ditch GPU mining in a matter of weeks, if not days

pcgamer.com:

It's actually happening. The ethereum blockchain's scary sounding Merge is about to take place, putting an end to years of wasteful GPU mining. There's no turning back now, either, as the hard fork required to start the process has already begun.

The Merge(opens in new tab) is a long-awaited event for the Ethereum blockchain, which has long been one of the most popular cryptocurrencies for GPU mining, and just one of the most popular cryptocurrencies. You could say it's primarily the reason why you couldn't buy a graphics card the past 18 months. You could say that, but it would probably be unfair to blame it all on one blockchain alone. There were shortages and stuff(opens in new tab), too.

But my point is that this is the big one: GPU mining would rise and fall off the back of ethereum's profitability and now that's all coming to an end. A hard fork in the ethereum blockchain has begun, nicknamed Bellatrix, and this will start the beginning of the end for the proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm and mining on the blockchain, for probably (hopefully) forever.

What will come afterwards is called proof-of-stake (PoS). It's essentially a different way of verifying and operating the blockchain using consensus from those with, you guessed it, a stake in the network. That means those that own significant amounts of ether (the actual cryptocurrency of the ethereum network) will be responsible for validating each transaction, rather than using a GPU or miner to waste precious energy on extremely tough mathematical equations.

For the proof-of-stake switch to happen, it's just a matter of waiting for a difficulty threshold to be met. The so-called Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) has been set at  58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000 and it's