It's the moment we've all been waiting for.
The London hardfork is happening today on the Ethereum mainnet.
The entire cryptoverse is looking to see how this affects not just the price,
but the rest of the smart contract ecosystem.
It's a pivotal moment in the development of Ethereum
that could make or break the smart contract giant.
Let's get it!
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My name is Ben.
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In this video,
we break down the latest Ethereum news
and what it could mean for the future of smart contracts on the blockchain.
Believe it or not, Ethereum has turned six years old as of July 30.
Back in 2013, the 20-year-old Vitalik Buterin wrote his Ethereum whitepaper
and would later meet the team that would help found Ethereum.
It's been a long and twisty road since then,
but the impact that Ethereum has had on crypto is undeniable.
Making it six years as a crypto is no easy feat.
There were many projects that showed a lot of promise over the past six years,
but many have ultimately faded away.
The road to smart contracts has been paved with controversy and delays,
but Vitalik and the Ethereum team has soldiered on.
I bought my first ETH back when it was less than $300 in 2017
and haven't looked back.
The more research I did about ETH, the more I saw its potential.
Yes, it's made me a lot of money,
but its fundamentals are what keeps it relevant to crypto.
With the 2021 bull run seemingly back in business,
it's the fundamentals that are keeping the market enthusiastic about its potential.
Ethereum broke the 200-day EMA on the 23rd of July and hasn't looked back.
It's had 12 consecutive green candles on the daily charts at the time of the recording of this video.
The supply shock from the fork hasn't even hit yet.
Flippening, anyone?
Anyone?
Players gonna play.
Haters gonna hate.
And programmers is going to put a full ETH node on a Raspberry Pi.
Maxis have long been butthurt over Ethereum's utility over Bitcoin's store of value
and tried to poke holes in its text since its inception.
One of the criticisms was that it was impossible to sync a full node of Ethereum.
Or if you could,
you needed to have a supercomputer or something crazy like that.
OS/2 Warp, why'd you have to go and die?
But the hyper nerds at Ethereum on ARM were able to fully validate a node
on the most kawaii of all the computers,
a Raspberry Pi.
I usually don't like fruit fillings.
$250 worth of dessert can add to the Ethereum network.
That's true decentralization.
It's not only great pocket sand to throw in the face of the maxis,
but it shows just how scalable and versatile Ethereum is.
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So the next few months for Ethereum are going to be a roller coaster of changes.
EIP-1559 has been shouted from the rooftops as a total game changer.
And it could be.
But I've always been telling you on this channel
that the real game changer for ETH is when it goes to proof-of-stake or ETH 2.0.
That won't be happening for at least another year.
EIP-1559 is really only doing one big thing--- changing the fee market mechanism.
That's pretty much it.
Such a small change could have huge implications just due to the fact that Ethereum is so heavily used.
Ethereum is proof-of-work and gets its network consensus via the Ethash encryption algorithm.
The algorithm was somewhat ASIC-resistant, but that's another story for another day.
For now, everyone and their brother has been buying high-end graphics cards as fast as possible
to mine some of that sweet, sweet Ether.
In turn, miners have not only become the most hated people by the PC gaming crowd,
watch out,
but also have driven up the prices of graphic cards that are even two, three or four years old.
For example, the AMD RX 580 graphics card was released in 2017.
By the end of 2019, you can pick them up on eBay for around $290.
It's back when Ethereum was $200 each.
Ah, the good old days.
But as mining became more profitable, the price of all graphic cards found support.
It stopped dropping.
In fact, they started rising.
Slowly at first, but then in January of 2021, the price of Ethereum started skyrocketing,
and combined with a supply chain disruption due to a certain superbug,
the price of the lowly RX 580 shot up to an eye-popping $890 in May of this year.
For a four-year-old graphic card,
that's insane.
But is it?
What were the miners getting?
Well, as of today,
Ethereum miners are paid out 12,800 in block rewards a day.
That's a deal.
You're paid to verify the network.
But the fee structure in Ethereum wasn't prepared to handle all this action,
so DeFi users and NFT junkies are blasted with gas fees.
Back in April, it wasn't uncommon to see gas in the 100-300 Gwei range.
That's hundreds of dollars just to make a transaction.
The blocks are flying hard and heavy around the Ethereum blockchain,
the miners were making a killing,
and the Ethereum developers knew they needed to fix that imbalance.
EIP-1559 was proposed in March of this year.
Work has been going full steam on it ever since.
The goal is to start burning some of the transaction fees on the network.
While some have called this deflationary, it really isn't.
It's just balancing the inflation for now.
Needless to say, the miners were not happy about this change,
and after some shenanigans about a show of force,
things have quieted down.
EIP-1559 is going to make fees a little better for the overall ETH market,
but the real upside will be speed and transparency.
EIP-1559 will give users more data on what they're paying for,
how much they're spending,
how high network congestion is
and more control over slippage.
It will also make Ethereum less dependent on external oracles
since the base fee is managed by the Ethereum protocol itself.
That's good for Ethereum and it's good for crypto.
It's bullish.
It's decentralizing.
And it's more transparency.
What's not to like?
This change is just a small chapter in the larger story of Ethereum
and one that hopefully we'll all soon forget
as Ethereum becomes ubiquitous and melts into the background of life
like all good technology does.
You, me and the rest of the crypto degens will always know and respect Ethereum,
but the masses, the average Joe,
the high schooler and the small business owner
will one day soon be using smart contracts
and not even know what an ETH is.
And that, my friends, is the future we're all hoping for.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.