When the Ethereum merge happens, it will create two blockchains — one that will just be called Ethereum and the other, PoW ETH. No, the current ETH chain won't be going anywhere. It will continue to exist. Developers can still build stuff on it if they want. The Ethereum that will likely exist in the center of the crypto zeitgeist, however, will be the new chain.

This happened before, actually. You're already following a fake ETH. The real one is ETC, Ethereum Classic. Ethereum hardforked before in one of the most monumentous moments in crypto up until that point. Basically, the Ethereum DAO got hacked and lost a ton of money, and Vitalik & friends decided to roll the chain back to basically reverse time. If the chain rolls back, the transactions that delivered ETH to hackers never existed. Therefore, the DAO never lost the money.

The community actually voted against this measure, because the immutability of the blockchain was more important to them than the money lost. Vitalik did the hardfork anyway. Ethereum Classic is the original chain that got hacked. On the zeitgeist Ethereum, the chain rolled back and it never happened. The Ethereum Foundation then used its influence (and the money they pulled back) to basically force the crypto public into accepting the new chain.

The one good thing about that hardfork was that everyone got treated to a little bonus — two ETHs on two chains. Both had value. So if you only wanted to stay on one chain, you could sell the ETH on the other chain for a bit of cash. That will happen again this time. The difference is that now people are ready for it.

The more ETH you have on chain at the time of the fork, the more ETH you get on the new chain. The chain doesn't know whether this ETH is borrowed, stolen, whatever. So speculators are borrowing ETH to have a larger print when the hardfork occurs. They have to hold it until the fork, so there is less selling pressure. That's why you see the rise in price now.

The rise in price is not because fundamental investors believe in the "power of the fork." It's because of these speculators borrowing ETH and holding it. They will immediately sell after the fork, and they'll pay back the borrowed ETH, and the price will fall. Precipitously.

But how much will this new PoW ETH be worth? How much will it sell for? Is it even worth all of this trouble?

The price of PoW ETH depends on how much value is placed against that PoW ETH in liquidity pools. You can bet that exchanges and other big LP providers will be participating in the Mass Sale after the fork. So that value, as all these huge entities sell, will fall bigly. A uuuge drop. We can take a look at ETC to see how much this will affect the price — PoW ETH can look to stabilize at around 1% of ETH price, if we're lucky.

But as value comes out of the LPs, liquidity will fall as well. You'll pay higher slippage fees to move that PoW ETH into something you can sell crosschain like USDT. You'll also pay higher gas fees as everyone rushes to the exits. You may even get shutdowns on CEXes as with other large scale crypto events. You'll need to bridge your new coins onto another chain to use them. Bridges will fail or take huge chunks. All of those things will cost you.

There may also be liquidations as ETH borrowers are (somehow) surprised at the speed and weight of the fall back to earth. All of this means the price of ETH falls, which causes the price of PoW ETH to fall, which lowers your take.

So if the price of ETH is $1779 as I speak, and 1% of that is like $18, is all of this worth it to you?

It is if you have a ton of ETH, maybe less so if you don't have as much. Are you borrowing 2 ETH to try to make like $40 that you don't even know you'll be able to spend? I dunno.

I would just say keep all this in mind before you try to participate in what is sure to be another debacle. The fundamental utility of blockchains in general has not improved to the point where they can handle huge events like this without a ton of really annoying and expensive errors and lag.