Bitcoin Forum

Amount of bitcoin is limited to 21,000,000 and the incentive for miners will eventually only be keeping nodes that comes from transaction fees.
Then a lot of miners will stop mining, hash-power goes down, and the transaction will get a very long time to get accepted, because by that time the mining difficulty would be very high.
Then the POW protocol won't work out.
What would happen then?

Why would the miners stop mining If it's profitable for them? even years from now, when there are no block rewards, transaction fees will still be very profitable. You're just assuming that bitcoin won't grow in the future. As for switching to POS, some members stated valid reasons on why we shouldn't: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2050869.0

PoW is fine if only you can manage the work to be more easily distributed.  That was the original intention, that everyone mined or at least it was common.  But the "work" was easy to transfer to ASIC, so they took over and lead to massive farms, concentrating hashing power.  PoS doesnt sovle this, it produces the same outcome of concentrations of hash power.  

Secondly, difficulty will adjust downward as and when mining reduces, so thats not a problem.

I think the POW mechanism is also excellent.
The transfer fee will continue to keep bitcoin running.

There will be strong opposition to PoS because there are majority of members who never will accept a change.  Also miners already spent millions of dollars for the purchase of application specific integrated circuits so why they will agree to suffer huge loses.

1.  The PoW Miners will never agree to a switch to Proof of Stake.

2.  Bitcoin is limited to 21 million coins, it would never be safe as a proof of stake coin.

Since the # of coins per staked block are a large % of its security.
(More coins per staked block the higher the security.)

Coins with less than a total of 1 billion coins are not safe to use for Proof of Stake , unless they use a checkpoint server.

And if they use a checkpoint server, it centralized control of the coin to block transactions to whomever controls the checkpoint server.  :P

So Bitcoin (with it's limited 21 million only coins) moving to Proof of Stake makes it unsecured.
And the required checkpoint server for it gives 1 individual complete dominance of which transactions are approved.
So PoS for Bitcoin is a no go.
 

For a Truly Decentralized Secured Proof of Stake coin,
you have to choose one with a quantity like ZEITCOIN of over 30 Billion. (Which is why after 4 years they never needed a checkpoint server. )

Higher # of Coins Matter in the Energy Efficient Proof of Stake design , in the Energy Wasteful Proof of Work design , the # of coins is irrelevant.

FYI:
In earlier arguments on the 2nd post of this forum,
Miners complain that PoS always gives total dominion to the early stakers,  
By the early stakers only selling their interest and keeping their principle,
this is possible because of a high interest rates of 4% and higher giving early stakers an unfair advantage,

ZEITCOIN has removed this issue by moving to an Ultra Low Inflation rate of only .0005% per year,
meaning the staker has to sell his principle and can not forever just sell his interest.
This also has a beneficial effect of keeping the price stable, as zeitcoin was ~$3 million Marketcap a few months ago and as other coins have lost 40% or more,
ZEITCOIN has remained stable.  :)

IT is not necessary for bitcoin to switch into POS. POW is good for bitcoin and the miner is there to support it. If the 21 million coins is reached maybe that is the time that bitcoin will switch into POS. By that time maybe there is much more better than Proof of Stake.

There are also far larger challenges to Bitcoin before it hits 21 million coins, the block size will not support serious usage for the next decade let alone hundred years.  We wait to see if Lightning will be adopted and if that works as expected.

Although I do not yet understand what will happen but I think all there must be a solution, and all will go well and smoothly.