PoW is on it’s way out - Ethereum is moving away from it and there is no reason for other cryptos to not follow.
The major player in PoW will remain Bitcoin, which won’t change.
But as soon as solar/wind become cheaper than coal, it will switch to green without a blink of an eye.
A random thought - I’m genuinely surprised Bitcoin folks didn’t yet crowdfund building a nuclear reactor for mining purposes ;) They crowdfunded first ASIC production lines which are 1000x cheaper, but at the time when Bitcoin was 1000x cheaper as well :)
Ethereum's development structure is only "centralized" in the same way that linux kernel development is "centralized". There is a big process that generates consensus across the community from a lot of different parties. By the time a change get into a pending hard fork, it's been through multiple rounds of establishing buy-in. Were the developers to push a major change in that didn't enjoy the support of the broader community, it would be abundantly apparent.
The Beacon chain went live in December, 2020 and has been running without issues.
It now has about 4 Million ETH locked and staking which cannot be withdrawn - that's almost $8 billion worth of ETH locked until the move to PoS happens. Which means now there is some real pressure to make it happen soon enough (between 8-15 months).
The situation now with the Beaconchain live and running is very different from the past 4 years of research and planning.
The study I think you’re referring to came from a crypto company. It’s the equivalent of when cigarette companies released studies saying smoking was good for your health.
It's weird seeing this argument that green energy is somehow free and infinite energy.
And yet, look at the market for Nvidia and AMD GPUs right now. The miners already know that gamers have been pushed out of the high end GPU market. Supply and demand doesn't go away. People still need electricity for doing things other than mining Bitcoin. All that happens is their electricity rates go up.
The major player in PoW will remain Bitcoin, which won’t change.
But as soon as solar/wind become cheaper than coal, it will switch to green without a blink of an eye.
A random thought - I’m genuinely surprised Bitcoin folks didn’t yet crowdfund building a nuclear reactor for mining purposes ;) They crowdfunded first ASIC production lines which are 1000x cheaper, but at the time when Bitcoin was 1000x cheaper as well :)