The End of the Mining Era: My Ethereum Story

I still remember that fateful day in September 2022 when my mining rig went silent. Not broken—just obsolete. After years of running hot GPUs day and night, squeezing every hash from my setup, Ethereum pulled the plug on us miners. The transition to Proof-of-Stake wasn't a surprise, but damn if it didn't hurt anyway.

Mining Ethereum used to be something special. While Bitcoin was already dominated by massive ASIC operations, Ethereum gave regular folks with decent GPUs a fighting chance. I built my first rig in 2020—six overclocked RTX cards crammed into a makeshift frame, fans whirring like a small airplane in my spare room. The heat was unbearable in summer, but watching those ETH rewards trickle in made it worthwhile.

But Vitalik and his team had other plans. They sold us on this environmental savior narrative about Proof-of-Stake using 99.95% less energy. Sure, that's true, but they conveniently glossed over how it also centralized power among the wealthy ETH holders. The rich get richer while small miners like me got kicked to the curb. Typical.

The so-called "Merge" was really a purge—eliminating an entire ecosystem of miners who'd secured the network for years. One day we're essential, the next we're environmental villains who need to be replaced.

What pisses me off most are these platforms still advertising "Ethereum mining" in 2025. They're either scamming newbies who don't know better or trying to rebrand staking as mining. It's NOT the same thing. Mining was democratic—anyone with hardware could participate. Staking? You need 32 ETH minimum to run a validator solo. At current prices, that's completely out of reach for average people.

I've reluctantly moved my rigs to Ethereum Classic and Ravencoin, but profitability is a shadow of what ETH mining used to be. Sometimes I wonder if I should have just sold all my hardware in 2022 before everyone else flooded the market with used GPUs.

The worst part is watching these exchanges promote staking as some amazing alternative. "Just lock up your ETH and earn passive income!" Yeah, at pitiful 4-7% APR while they take their cut. Remember when mining could return your hardware investment in months during bull markets? Those days are gone forever.

For anyone still searching how to mine ETH in 2025—you can't. That ship has sailed, sunk, and been buried at sea. Either buy ETH directly from trading platforms, stake what you already have, or mine alternative coins. Just don't fall for cloud mining scams promising ETH rewards. If someone claims they can mine Ethereum for you today, they're lying to your face.

The future belongs to those who adapt, I guess. But I'll always miss the wild west days of ETH mining—when a person with technical skills could carve out their piece of the crypto revolution without needing a fortune to start.