Uncharted territories for sure. I wouldn't be surprised if we're gonna see a few bumpy moments in the next months.

To the contrary - I think the traders on Twitter are deeply frustrated that the algorithm doesn't care about their feelings. No one is using ETH for anything, so the fees are low. 20% of it is staked so the stake earnings are low. Fundamentally they all thought (we all thought?) that the merge would happen, Jesus would descend from the heavens, Blackrock would buy a trillion dollars worth of ETH and we'd all ride into the sunset in our lambos.

We know what's going to happen. It's an equation. When gas is above 15 gwei, ethereum is deflationary. When gas is below 15 gwei, ethereum is inflationary. If Yuga decided to pull this bullshit again, the burn will be ridiculous - gas hit 474 with that little stunt. The more you use it, the more valuable it becomes, full stop. The more valuable it becomes, the more incentive for sharding and off-chain stuff.

To some degree nobody knows the new balance but I feel like my level of understanding of Ethereum has declined in the past years as the tech has become more occluded.

Well, I mean the entire fee structure changed barely a year ago. And nobody has really had their head on about staking, and all the discussion has been about "liquid" staking, which isn't staking, it's pawn.

It's really pretty simple. Think of it like a construction bond. You put up a certain amount of money as guarantee that a homeowner will have recourse if you screw up her kitchen miserably. Having that bond gives you the right to legally remodel kitchens in circumstances where the government wants a bonded contractor to do the work. You put up money, you buy the right to work. In this case, you are putting up 32 ETH for the right to vote on blocks, which pays you fees a few different ways. The end.

Or think of it like a fishing license. I knew a guy who really wanted a lobster permit - they're $100k a year and there's a long list but if you have one, you have the potential to make half a million a year. Or think of it like a taxi medallion - they were $100k and there's a long list. Having one, however, gave you the right to drive around Manhattan charging people a dollar a mile to be taken from street corner to street corner which is an excellent middle class living until Uber destroys it.

I keep forgetting that the fundamental innovation behind crypto is its ability to create trust from algorithms (aka thin air). Considering there is nothing but a vague promise, it's a small miracle that there are already 420,000 validators each putting 32 ETH just on that promise.

Yeah but once you get it, you get it. It's not a miracle, it's math. And once you get that, the implications are profound.

The problem "the market" has right now is they're rightly assessing that their immediate fortunes are much more impacted by the fact that Germany seized Rosneft's operations than they are by the fact that Ethereum now fits in ESG funds. They aren't even looking at the whole trustless aspect of it all because it isn't tradeable right now.