That's a good outcome. We'd still be in a situation with so many fewer miners that GPU prices aren't influenced as they have been. The investment becomes risky as it'll always be teetering on the edge. I'm finally looking forward to a new GPU to pair with this 11900K.
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.
With the second-largest cryptocurrency using PoS, do you really expect the PoW ones to stay profitable for more than a niche group? I'd expect people who want to actually use it for something else than speculating to move to the superior tech that doesn't contribute to climate change. At this point Bitcoin etc. would become no more than a betting platform.
There are people that support the concept of Proof of Work that aren't miners, so some other networks could zoom in value. Ethereum Classic is still a $5bn marketcap, for example.
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.
