Well, Ethereum is now PoS, lol. The troubles with Solidity and transaction fees remain, but now the block validators are even more concentrated and more like a “decentralized” Wizard of Oz.
Meanwhile, thanks to the EthMiners, we are now overrun with a bounty of hash. As someone that casually mined ETH in the early days, and then turned my rigs to it when profits skyrocketed, I can tell you exactly what happened to the majority of the mining income from that platform… it was not hodled. Why? Because of the ridiculous transaction fees.
Many mine it straight to an exchange wallet to minimize fees, and a large fraction of GPU miners were using things like nicehash or 2miners to mine ETH and get paid in BTC. These are the new miners that are joining us, and if you are one, welcome!
For existing ergonauts, the question is how to play this, and I encourage hodling and welcoming. But the price is probably gonna drop now, and then begin a pendulum swing of readjustments along with mining difficulty. Quite a shock to the system, and an interesting opportunity for non-linear growth.
The easiest way out of the pain is for price to go up, but the entire mindset of the new crew is getting paid in dollars or BTC because ETH is horrible.
ETA: I expect the periodicity of the price action to resonate with the delay in difficulty adjustments.