The relationship between energy consumption and cryptocurrency mining is very close, which is why some members of the Ethereum community argue that the Merge has helped to significantly reduce the amount of energy used globally.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, quoted developer Justin Drake a few days ago to say that global energy consumption would decrease by 0,2% thanks to the merger. This statement, expressed in this way, assumes that all miners permanently shut down their machines after the merge and stop mining.
The truth is that electricity consumption could have been significantly reduced, but not at the level of mining in general, but of the energy used by the Ethereum network in particular for its operation. This is because the hardware used for mining on this network, graphics cards (GPUs), is not unique. It is possible to mine a wide range of cryptocurrencies with the same hardware, so many miners have simply migrated to other networks to reactivate their plants.
To extract or not to extract, that is the question
Crypto-Currency reported the departure of many Ethereum miners to the Ethereum Classic, Ravencoin, Neoxa and Ergo networks, among others. These networks saw marked growth in their hashrate in the days leading up to the merger, both before and after. However, the profitability of mining these cryptocurrencies is much lower than that offered by Ethereum at the time.
The combination of consistently lower profitability than Ethereum, a falling cryptocurrency market, the rising cost of electricity in many countries and the gradual increase in mining difficulty with the arrival of more miners, led many of these migrant miners to shut down their plants again, as discussed by Crypto-Currency in a recent article.
For now, Drake's prediction could come true and mining energy consumption after the merger has dropped significantly. However, the moment of truth will come when one of the cons that miners face changes. It could be a change in the market trend, a drop in electricity prices or a favorable adjustment of the mining difficulty that allows us to measure how many miners have moved away permanently and how many have simply shifted their energy consumption up. another network.
