Mining, will it dissapear or stay alive a little longer or forever is irrelevant, even with the "high cost" of electricty the production of the bitcoin is way cheaper than the production cost of the dollar banknote, to make a dollar you need to plant cotton in big countrysides and usually deforestating the environment, without considering the processing cost or transport. In other hand what is the cost for mining a cryptocurrency? Just electricty? One of the cheapest resources? Which we got a lot of quantity and everyday is getting cleaner and more sustainable, well I would prefer using cryptocurrency by far, but usually people get lied by the media. Although there are alternatives like IOTA, which dont depend on miners and they are giving something really exciting. IOTA PoW is done in ternary. This means, that you cannot natively perform that PoW on any existing CPU or GPUs. That PoW needs to be emulated, which drastically degredates the performance.
They are creating JINN chips specifically for this, which will be a fraction of the price of a GPU and will outperform the best gaming rigs.
So, in the short term the fastest binary processors and GPUs will be the best.
In the long term, anything that is out in tye market now will be out performed by a $50 JINN processor.
This is really a paradigm shift for hardware as well.
I'm going to research these JINN processors, first time I hear of them, thanks for sharing.