I still believe in the potential of blockchain technology, including cryptocurrency and DeFi.
It's just that the energy demand of the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism has become too big to justify anymore.
It looks like Bitcoin is (unfortunately) not switching to Proof-of-Stake any time soon, but then again, all relevant Bitcoin mining is being done with specialized ASICs these days.
Miners use GPUs mostly to mine Ethereum. And the Ethereum blockchain is expected to (finally) migrate from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake some time this year, in a widely anticipated event called "The Merge". At that moment, Ethereum mining will simply cease to be a thing. And for the sake of both the climate and for gamers, that moment can't come soon enough. 🙏
Heck, even the Dogecoin developers have announced their intention to switch to Proof-of-Stake eventually. 🐶
I know there are many other PoW-based cryptocurrencies in existence that GPU-owning crypto miners could switch to, but honestly, most popular tokens of value (notably ETH and most popular stablecoins) are ERC-20 tokens, which are all on the Ethereum blockchain. And aside from Ethereum, pretty much all of the interesting stuff seems to be happening on newer blockchains that are all Proof-of-Stake already (Solana, Cardano, Polkadot, Algorand, etc).
So even though the chip shortage will probably continue for some time after it, I'm really curious what will happen to the GPU market once The Merge has taken place. My guess is it will likely incentivize crypto miners to liquidate their mining assets, including the mass dumping of their GPUs on the second hand market, so they can purchase as much ETH as possible to stake instead (or simply to cash out and exit the crypto business altogether).
And then there's Intel, which is finally about to make its serious entry into the midrange consumer GPU market. That should shake things up in the market as well.
So never lose hope. 🙂