Who wouldn't want to get some cheap ETH, specially for those who have missed the boat.
"cheap" is a very complicated concept when it comes to altcoins specially when you are looking at USD value of them. majority of the altcoins aren't really traded against USD but mainly against BTC so obviously majority of traders are investing their "bitcoin" in altcoins. ETH is not an exception.
even if we ignore that and only focus on USD values, a quick comparison between their USD value and bitcoin USD value shows that altcoins have never been "cheap" specially in the long run. in fact most of them are super expensive and
overvalued.
take ETH that you mentioned here. 4 years ago in 2016 when bitcoin was starting its rise after the halving was done and it was sitting at $400, ETH was sitting at 0.035
BTC and today after 4 years it still has pretty much the same value around 0.03
BTC and it is currently pumped!
and if you had put the same fiat in ETH instead of BTC after 4 years you would be in a loss even though your fiat has grown.
and that's with the current pumped ETH price, keep in mind ETH has unlimited supply and can't keep its price up in the long run due to inflation alone.
Eth is the lever that is used to help boost btc demand.
many pools allow auto-vert of eth to btc. in fact nicehash insists that all the eth you mine must become btc.
So if eth goes up higher then btc it drags the btc price upwards.
As a miner. I mine eth at nice hash and auto vert to btc.
for 4600 i can buy enough gpus to mine 24 usd a day. burning 2000 watts.
for 4600 i can buy enough btc asics to mine 17 usd a day. burning 6000 watts .
so same out of cash i get 7 usd extra. and I also save 4000 in watts.
this is a tremendous disparity in favor of GPU mine eth at nicehash and autovert to btc
when miners such as myself do this is causes a run on older already mined btc. since we mined eth and trade it to btc.
so high profits for eth mining ⛏ really helps out btc price.
these out of wack ratios have not been around in a few years. mostly in 2016 and 2017.
and coins went to the moon.
I expect a lot of eth this year to act as stimulus for btc price. we will see what happens.