Whoever was using this electronics switched to other BTC variants, but in long term this reduced profitability and should harm people using energy in this way.
But sadly no immediate impact, unless there are electronics that could be profitably consuming power for Ethereum and it is not profitable for alternatives.
It's also true that there are second order effects, like for example all the mining hardware dedicated to ETH needs to find a new home, which will depress prices for new mining hardware for "chains that are hardware-compatible with old ETH", and thus probably support their prices a bit.
[1] And do, I think. IIRC there was a stat rolling around a few months back showing electrical grid usage dropping due to the crypto crash, but can't remember where it was or how reliable the source seemed.
[2] Though AFAICT no one is tracking exchange rates for it yet, so your guess is as good as mine as to its value.
That's like saying a stock price is directly proportional to the p/e ratio. Things have both intrinsic and extrinsic value. You are only considering the intrinsic value. In reality, people mine stuff at a loss all the time because they think it might be work more later, i.e. speculation.
Exactly! Which is why we expect the energy expended on mining PoWETH to drop to zero as the coin dies due to lack of interest, which was the upthread point you were arguing against.
It's possible to justify reasons to continue. Bad reasons. But how many miners care?
I don't think that's a solid argument. Some coins were structured such that there would be a finite supply (21M in the case of bitcoin IIRC). The health of a coin seems to me to be its transaction volume, and somewhat related its ability to be directly exchanged for physical goods or services.
So back to a previous user's suggestion: instead of buying energy to mine coins at a loss, one could instead buy the coins at a lower price which seems on many levels to make more sense than to continue mining.
No, mining is economic activity, not investment. You pay stuff to get stuff. Whether you then invest your profits in crypto has nothing to do with where you got them.
They are not the same concept, in fact they're completely orthogonal. You don't mine to get coins for investment, because you can get coins much (MUCH!) more cheaply via other means. You mine to get income in the present.
Overpaying for an investment doesn't make it NOT an investment. You're just saying that arbitrarily.
https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/network-hashrate and https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/difficulty
A blockchain compatible with old ETH is old ETH... the classic one.
This is a bit trickier. If they have equipment already then it changes situation.
Cost of computing hashes includes mostly energy and hardware.
As long as it can pay for operating costs, they will continue to do this, even if buying electronics for that is no longer profitable
(unless selling equipment is more profitable)