Can you hear that sound?" It is the winds of change blowing toward ethereum, and once ethereum dominates the cryptocurrency network, the best graphics cards, or even any graphics card, will shift the bulk of demand to gaming rather than mining. Or so it is hoped.

This is the good news (for gamers). The bad news is that this will not happen overnight. Ethereum has two major updates planned, called the London Hard Fork. Ethereum developer Tim Bayko confirmed on Twitter that this will take place on August 4, 2021.

The London hard fork is the precursor to the Ethereum 2.0 update, which should have a more meaningful impact on the GPU shortage (fingers crossed anyway). It consists of five Ethernet Improvement Proposals (EIPs), the most notable of which are EIP 1559 and EIP 3554, as noted by CoinDesk.

EIP 1559 would change the fee structure by introducing a minimum fee for all on-chain transactions. Currently, users set transaction fees, which are accepted by miners. However, this will be replaced by a new "base fee" automatically set by the Ethereum protocol, which will be removed or burned from the network rather than rewarded to the miner.

The bottom line is that this important change could reduce revenue for miners. As you can imagine, not everyone is looking forward to this change, but it is being done in large part to reduce the volatility of Ethereum.

"While I think [EIP 1559] will bring better predictability for transaction inclusion, many transactions that require expanded computing resources for smart contract execution ... I think fee burning is a bad idea given that it is no longer compensated," Slava Karpenko, chief technology officer of ethereum mining pool 2Miners, told CoinDesk.

Meanwhile, EIP 3554 has been called a "difficulty bomb delay," referring to a time when Ethereum mining will become more difficult with the aforementioned Ethereum 2.0 update. Barring any new delays, this is scheduled to take place on December 1, 2021.

As gamers, this shift is something we are looking forward to. While it may not be perfect, Ethereum is the largest cryptocurrency mined on GPUs rather than the specialized ASIC hardware used primarily for currencies like Bitcoin.

This entails a change from the so-called proof-of-work model to a proof-of-stake model, where mining requires more computing power to shift transactions and generate new Ethers. This means that the network itself will validate transactions (or blocks) according to the miner's existing stake in the ether.

If this occurs, many Ethereum miners may sell their GPUs. While there is still an industry-wide shortage of silicon affecting the overall supply of graphics cards, the flood of used cards on places like eBay and Craigslist should help the situation, along with the reduced demand for new GPUs for mining.

However, the postponement to December 1 means that GPUs will likely remain in short supply for the rest of the year. The best-case scenario is that GPUs will be a little more readily available in early 2022, again, provided there are no time-bomb delays. Alternatively (and hopefully not), another cryptocurrency mined on GPUs could replace Ethereum and become super popular.