Europe, and especially the UK, is about to be priced out of the mining game.

Right now Europe is going through an unprecedented Energy crisis, with the UK being the worst affected by a significant margin.

Due to a variety of reasons but chiefly the Ukraine war, natural gas - which we use to power turbines that provide most of the UK's energy is in extremely short supply.

Today, figures revealed that our energy price is set to skyrocket in October, and then again in January 2023, then again in April.

*This is an early estimation

What this means is that mining Cryptocurrencies is just completely out of the question for the UK.

Take an Antminer for example - at a wattage of 1,323 watts, with a unit price of £0.52 in October and a 13.5TH/s computation rate, this puts you at an effective profit of -94% per day.

If Ethereum was sticking with mining, it wouldn't be much better at all. The profit rate for a 360MH/s rig at 750w is -30% per day. Before the October price hike, it was +30% daily profit.

Mining is now out of reach in the UK, and certain parts of Europe such as France, Germany & Italy are also feeling a winter of impending price rises.

I wonder what effect this will have on the future of Proof of Work. Currently, the largest Proof of Stake Crypto platforms in order by Market Cap are:

• Cardano
• Solana
• Algorand
• Tezos
  

It will be interesting to see if Ethereum miners who may have considered switching to Ergo or Ravencoin will instead bin off their miners entirely. In fact, Nvidia is reporting that they are expecting a massive surplus of RTX 3000 series to hit the second hand market soon.