Agree: It was both the Mining Gold Rush and Covid combined that hurt.
That said, the mining thing is just another face of greed. As long as those blockchains have value associated with them, it will not die.
We(the people) gave them value. As they gain confidence from more and more of us to use mathematical, digital puzzles as a form of currency, it will become even more valuable... at least until they're all mined, anyways.
There's like 21-22M Bitcoins in total, and like 19M of them have been mined since last month. The difficulty in mining that last couple million is very high.
Heck if I know how many Ethereum, or other coins there are - I just know it's not infinite.
Someone will go out and create another one, people will mine and 'HODL' that one until the whole stock is mined up, rinse and repeat.
But yeah, greed.
There's nothing really stopping Bob - besides supply - with his current 5 gpu mining rig in his basement, from going out and 'acquiring' 5 more for another rig. 'Free money'.
Same deal for you or me really... though I went and used Nicehash calculator to give myself an idea of how much I'd make with my 1080Ti, and it just wasn't profitable. If I ran it all day, I'd make like 5USD.
I'm not running my only PC and gpu all day - overnight at most, so screw that.
I gave myself a headache looking at Reddit(go figure) with all that HODL to the moon nonsense.
This crap is no different from the stock market in that many are going to get burned.
It is a gambling game to HODL until the last coin is mined... then those who cash in at the right time = $$$$$. The masses? They get bent over, tied to a vaulting horse, and take it in all orifices with no lube, because the value will crash like nothing else, and there's no value associated with it anymore because there's none left to mine.