I decided to shut down my ETH mining operations a few hours before the Merge. It was getting close to midnight, and I didn’t want my mining rigs grinding away at “nothing” in the middle of the night. So, with all due pomp and circumstance, I began an orderly, ceremonious abandonment of my mining operations.

I’m a little sad about it. With only a few GPUs, mining ETH has been (at best) break-even for the past couple of years… but that’s not the point. I began mining ETH in the fall of 2015; it was really fun. I got an up-close-and-personal view of the way the Ethereum consensus mechanism worked, got deep into the economics of mining, learned about mempools and MEV (maximal extractable value), learned how bad actors front run blocks, and was exposed to all kinds of interesting blockchain tech issues. Then, when it became more efficient to join a mining pool, I threw in with Ethermine.

It was a nice run. I learned a lot and I mined some ETH in the process.

If you’re wondering what ceremony was performed as I ceremoniously abandoned my mining rigs … I offered a simple nod to the crypto gods as I asked Alexa to ask Spotify to play the Doobie Brothers version of “What a Fool Believes” at volume 10. Then, with a click of the mouse, it was the end of an era.

A new era of Ethereum has begun. DeFi, Web3, and the metaverse (whatever that turns out to be) will be better for it.

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