Thank goodness. Hopefully they aren’t able to grift another coin up enough to be worth mining.
the 2020 cycle was a triple whammy though
1) semiconductor and supply chain shock
2) cryptocurrencies zooming in price and profitability again
3) cryptocurrencies actually being used. in all prior cycles, blockchains were empty (although people got a glimpse of what congestion would be like, during the 2017 cycle). miners earned the subsidy made for people to show up at all. miners are also privy to a cut of transactions that occur, but this was close to 1% of the subsidy. in the 2020 cycle it was 250% on top of the subsidy, frequently, and way more than that as blocks were full. All mining calculators were wrong because they only show the predictable subsidy and not a forecast based on an average, but miners learned how profitable it was.
Automated Market Makers (Uniswap code and classes) and Automated Lending (Compound) were 2020 cycles killer apps built on top of 2017’s killer app of ERC20 tokens.
Followed by NFT’s and their marketplaces.
Other chains secured by GPUs will get this activity, periodically.
More people will be swayed if Ethereum mainnet works after further phases of its scaling plan, without user experience drawback. Ethereum post-merge still has some ambitious theoretical things, like sharding. This should have some drawbacks.
People think scaling isnt possible without drawbacks so are fine with lower bandwidth Proof of Work that just meters by transaction fees.
What was it before ETH PoW -> PoS merge?
And is 0.1 $/kWh average/normal?
Let me pull up my latest electric bill (which I almost have never looked at/have on autopay):
New Charges
Rate: RS-1 RESIDENTIAL SERVICE Base charge: $8.99
Non-fuel: (First 1000 kWh at $0.073710) (Over 1000 kWh at $0.083710) $76.74
Fuel: (First 1000 kWh at $0.034870) (Over 1000 kWh at $0.044870) $36.49
Electric service amount 122.22
20.99 in taxes / surcharges
Total $143.21
$143.21 for 1036 kWh in a 30 day timespan
0.138 $/kWh with taxes and fees I guess for me, I'm sure if I was doing crazy ASIC stuff at my house they'd charge me more/the rate would become less favorable
Looks like mining BTC would net be $0.85 a day profit with some kind of ASIC. $310/yr. Yikes.
Most of these coins only have value as scams that you could prop up then cash out by exchanging for BTC or ETH; so long as the "new coin of the day" hype train exists there will be a way to make money off of GPU mining. I guess there will always be suckers in this unregulated market.