It’s all moot. ETH 2.0 is coming June and it uses proof of stake which uses a tiny fraction of what proof of work uses. All things like this article should do is make you invest in proof of stake coins because they are the future.
Why is it taking so long for proof of stake to happen? They've been talking about it for many years and the fact that none of the mainstream coins have moved to proof of stake and there is no rising new coin that uses it, make me think there's a fundamental issue with it.
It's comically complicated once you get into the details of moving an existing chain over from PoW; the Ethereum developers have really been working on it for years and only now have it in a shape that works for multiple Ethereum clients on a shared test network.
If PoW weren't a climate disaster it would have very obvious appeal due to its orders of magnitude simpler implementation.
So why hasn't there been any new POS coins? If the complexity is in maintaining the history, new coins wouldn't have that problem.
Even outside of any hypothetical technical complexity, a system that explicitly pushes all the power to those with the most money seems antithetical to the point.
That's the majority of actual chains in the top 20, since many of the rest are tokens running on top of other chains (USDT, USDC, SHIB, BUSD, &c)
In general, starting a clone of proof-of-stake Ethereum is a very popular way to make a new chain.
As for the philosophical point, PoW isn't really different. It takes tremendous capital investment to produce enough hash rate to ever mine a BTC. These are all more or less systems in which the rich get richer and the not-rich get to gamble.
> So why hasn't there been any new POS coins? If the complexity is in maintaining the history, new coins wouldn't have that problem.
There are dozens of new networks launched over the last two years, they are all PoS.
> Even outside of any hypothetical technical complexity, a system that explicitly pushes all the power to those with the most money seems antithetical to the point.
What power do PoS stakers have? They select the order of transactions. That's it. The goal is to distribute this role across enough people so that they cannot collude to censor a transaction. That's essentially the only goal.
Doing it in a truly decentralized way with consensus from the community on how to do that on a chain already in motion is no easy task I guess. Vitalik has showed a slide from many years ago with his way too optimistic dates for when proof of stake would be here.
Even when or if this switch eventually finally happens, if the current inertia keeps going and the idea that "cryptocurrency causes climate change" continues to gain mainstream traction, it's going to be very hard to make people change their beliefs without a huge, concerted marketing campaign.
People were a bit eager with the announcements, but the real progress is there. A few steps big steps were finished last year and now the big merge is scheduled for 22. https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/
It's been slow, but progress is happening. There's already ~$28 billion worth of ETH staked on the beacon chain. Most of the engineering work for the merge has already happened. A post-merge testnet (Kintsugi) was launched a few weeks ago. If you look at the mainnet readiness checklist [1], the remaining work is largely testing and documentation. Hard to imagine how it could not happen at this point.
You'd think so, but it seems that people who have a problem with cryptocurrency in general are already laying the groundwork for the next assault. This is one of the tweets in the linked thread:
It basically claims that cryptocoins are "sound money", and that "sound money" is inherently racist. I tried to follow the logic in that thread, and, so far as I can tell, it boils down to something akin to "Hitler was a vegetarian, ergo, vegetarianism is bad".
The difficulty bomb will effectively be the end of proof of work as far as I know. I apologize if that is wrong. I used to be an Ethereum miner long ago but haven’t done it for some time.
The difficulty bomb exists to make evolving the protocol by forking it smoother, since there's no practical way to keep using the 'original chain' indefinitely (TBH I think this is one of the better ideas in etherium after seeing all the drama around bitcoin hardforks). It can be effectively put off indefinitely while still staying on PoW by just forking to a version of the protocol which the same but with a later difficulty bomb, and indeed this has already been done multiple times. The current plan as stated by the foundation is to not extend it again (at least officially: miners could start their own fork if they wanted but it would be up to the market to decide which one is worth anything), but they can postpone it again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake