My name is Nicholas Johnson, Im sitting in the same exact spot where the Bitcoin 2022
convention took place this year, the miami beach convention center and this computer
is mining Ether.
Lets talk about an inefficient air cooling solution - this room has to be a million square
feet of air-conditioning!
Ethereum is cruising this week!
Probably because a team of developers has announced that a tentative merge schedule
targets the week of September 19th, THIS SEPTEMBER the 19th for the completion of the ethereum
network moving to proof of Stake; all these beautiful clumps of hardware like what you
see here suddenly being laid off from their little virtual office cubicles and suddenly
needing to look for work.
Im simultaneously pretty sad about it and also really looking forward to watching it
all play out..
ALL the speculation over the years of what coin miners will migrate to and then how that
wont work when you look at the EXTRAORDINARY amount of comparative compute power currently
pointed at ethereum.
I cant wait to see the flood of GPUs on the market and wether theyre able to go below
MSRP (the original MSRP, not the inflated one) and if all gamers around the world will
rejoice and pick up these re-padded RTX 3080’s and 3090’s so they can run tomb raider at
400 frames per second on a 1080p monitor that only refreshes at 60htz.
JK ray tracing is beautiful.
Then theres ethereum itself - will it go up in value immediately post merge because milestones?
Or is that already priced in this week and the next couple months?
Will ethereum be the rising sun that ends the crypto winter?
ALSO, think, for a second, if you will, about the fact that there are literally millions
of GPU miners right now.
Not all of us, but certainly a large piece of that hash-pie is cashing in some of their
horde every month to pay for electricity, pay for rent, for spare parts, for dead boards
or fans or risers or just to pay themselves.
Thats millions of dollars of built in sell pressure to the ethereum blockchain..
Millions of dollars that will instantly stop ‘tentatively’ on September 19th..
So its possible that even if the build up is priced in and we wont see a ton of extra
buying, we will very suddenly see a LOT less selling, and daily.
Combine that with all that locked up, staked ethereum that you cant access now - staying
locked up for a bit after the merge executes.
I think ether will catch fire in the fourth quarter of this year.
Then again, I found this poll on reddit where about a third of people asked think its just
going to get pushed back again like it has before.
Personally, I dont know.. I dont know.. I dont really have any way to know..
Feels like its going through though, to me.
At this moment now this one RTX 3080 grosses $2.20…
After paying for electricity that means youre taking home something like a buck fifty a
day.
Woof!
I only have four of these things, so at stake here for me is a whopping $180 a month - even
if we assume this is going back to its all time high thats hardly a retirement fund..
There was a time early last year when this same setup would have brought home for you
9 or 10 bucks a day per card!
I do remember seeing $1200 a month in my Cudominer estimates.
Surprisingly, Ether is still the most profitable thing to be mining, even at this greatly diminished
price per token.
I imagine there is SOMETHING out there thats going to do extremely well a year from now,
but who the heck knows what that will be.
It does bum me out a bit just knowing that I can touch this little piece of glass, like
right now, in just the right way and be filthy rich by christmas, but I dont get to know
what thing is going to burp out a 1000% win out of nowhere and neither do any of you.
Sphere made a come back.
Still down though.
I know, this is the 100th time that Ethereum has set some sort of date for the completion
of the transition - but this time theyre saying its actually done.
The code is written, all thats left to do is the testing and then the merge.
Also a couple of days went by and now Im upstate New York at an art thing on some property
called Stone Leaf and I found this pond to sit next to.
There are a lot of bugs.
According to Vitalik Buterin - the testing is 90% complete and only needs to be tested
on ropsten (I dont actually know what that means!)
Evidently the 9th Shadow Fork has gone live which puts us on the final trial phase of
the merge.
Though, during this same interview he did say it ‘could happen as early as september’
so calling the week of September 19th the actual date may not be a sure bet.
After the merge, theres a thing called the Serge - that we all get to look forward to
next!
Thats what will massively massively scale up the transaction speed and capacity.
Good times!