Is there some way you can bet against that claim?
When normality is restored, I'll be happy to finally upgrade.
In my view, this site is strong evidence for the thesis that demand for GPUs will plummet, here's why:
1) If we tweak your link to sort by Market Cap, we can see the next biggest coin to mine after ETH is has only 1% of ETH's market cap https://shorturl.at/lxLS5
2) These smaller coins do not have the capability to automatically or naturally grow bigger market caps, trading volumes, and buy-side demand just because ETH switches to PoS. Mining profitability ultimately comes from a coin's buy-side demand, which is proportional to many things-- fame, developer activity, etc.-- and none of the PoW chains in that list are anywhere remotely close to "breaking out" and growing proportionally with Ethereum, or, say, Solana. How do I know this? Well, I'm an insider that focuses all of his time on ethereum and web3, you'll have to take my word for it :)
> These smaller coins do not have the capability to automatically or naturally grow bigger market caps, trading volumes, and buy-side demand just because ETH switches to PoS.
What would they need to cross that barrier? For example, don't all coins have the ability to manipulate trade volume by sending money between owned wallets?
Why sell a GPU for a fraction of the price, when you can just switch over to another coin and make 50-90% of the money you were making still.
The good news here may be two-fold
1) the existing group of public chains have matured greatly and their network effects are quite strong now. It is no longer so easy to start a new chain
2) virtually all new chains are PoS because it's understood to be significantly more secure and less expensive vs. PoW
3) public chains take years to grow, and right now, there is no PoW public chain on my radar that has a chance of generating nearly as much mining demand as Ethereum (and Bitcoin but ASICs)
For those reasons, the idea of a new public chain appearing from nowhere and impacting GPU demand seems in practice unlikely to occur.
PoS security relies on the integrity of the stake — and the integrity of the stake relies on the “security” of the PoS system. It’s an intractible circularity problem.
Yes, a large sample of recent altcoins have shipped PoS, but this is no more relevant to a PoW v PoS security debate than a modern top 40 “hit songs” chart is to a debate over Beethoven v Bach.
Do you have insider knowledge or just a quality crystal ball?
Here's an overview
Dec 2020: proof of stake launched in production, but isn't yet used to secure ethereum, it runs in parallel
October 2021: the last major upgrade to Ethereum before switching to proof of stake went live in production
Today: proof of stake "Merge" testnets are live, all core teams are 100% focused on the merge, regular progress reports are nominal, etc.
After Ethereum switches to proof of stake, global demand for GPUs will plummet as GPUs are uncompetitive for BTC mining, and beyond BTC, ETH is by far the largest remaining proof of work coin.