Ethereum Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Ethereum, the decentralized application platform and smart contract enabled blockchain. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Once the Casper POS update releases, will miners still be using GPU to execute smart contracts and power the EVM?
My understanding is that this form of 'mining' will still exist, but it wont lead to the spontaneous generation of new ETH tokens - but will instead garnish gas as a reward. Is this accurate?
Even now, GPUs are not used for the EVM. Mining is simply deliberate busywork, a way to spend computational resources with an easy way to prove that it happened in retrospect. Smart contracts and the EVM are totally done by the CPUs of every full node.
Post-Casper, GPUs likely won't be used at all. Casper does not require heavy computation, let alone deliberately wasteful ones. In a pure PoS world, validators (the PoS equivalent of miners) run smart contracts and the EVM on their own CPUs. In addition to transaction fees, they might be paid a subsidy of new ETH. (As far as I know, this has not been finalized.)
However, the current plan (as of May 2017) is for a stage of a PoS/PoW hybrid chain, where both Casper and PoW miners will coexist
