For the entire year of 2021 I was a single-GPU-miner with an AMD RX5700XT I used to have "by accident". I never bought the card for crypto, but once the bull-run emerged I was aware of it's mining potential and used it most of the day to mine ETH - which made me good profits, even though I live in a country with very high electricity costs.

I think the latest date where most people switched of their home mining activity was September 15, 2022. The day the ETH merge happened. When ETH switched to POS, all miners swarmed to the remaining PoW coins, and their revenue dropped by a lot.

Since the ETH merge 156 days passed - I made a quick research to find out how the state of GPU mining changed in the meantime.

Hashrate and Price

I looked at the hashrates of two of the largest PoW coins, ETC and RVN on 2miners.com. Looks not that bad, about 50% down from peak after the merge. Indeed a lot of miners had to give up in the long run, which means they were not able to run their farms in profit.

https://preview.redd.it/bdabzbdftuia1.png?4628&format=png&auto=webp&s=4301f7e011450d206e1d506b2df1b69cd80a4b80

But looking at the price shows there is not that much hope - in fact these coins also dropped by about 50% or more since the merge (data taken from coingecko.com).

https://preview.redd.it/3wxj3vlnvuia1.png?3352&format=png&auto=webp&s=05e4e4f436516e72689533517c5bd2a0f14fc256

Revenue

Let's look at the hard data. I take my card (RX5700XT) for example. I checked the revenue it could make right now using whattomine.com, and picked the highest 3 coins AND an alternative pick you won't find on such websites.

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^{My electricity cost is about 0.38$/kWh and I estimate about 180W of power. If you don't live in germany, it's almost certainly cheaper for you.}

Since I know my card is rather old today, I also checked two more recent ones to not give a false impression here. But it really doesn't get better a lot. Some cards can mine a lot more, but they are also consuming a lot more electricity.

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^{I don't have these cards so I just take the optimal power whattomine.com estimates.}

Conclusion

Making profits with GPU mining is still almost impossible unless you have free or almost free electricity available - for example in regions with excess electricity. As a single GPU miner you probably have the best chances with Folding@Home for Banano to make profits if you have cheaper electricity than me (which most of you should have). But you should know that F@H doesn't scale linear with a farm, so it's not a viable option for mining farms!

So even 156 days after the merge, GPU mining shouldn't be profitable in most regions on normal electricity. And this is a good thing in my opinion! If GPU mining stays exclusive to excess electricity, their operation is the most sustainable ands the carbon footprint remains almost zero.