Please take into account that over time, new generations of ASICs are more effectively and beneficially in energy consumption and hashrate it can produce. In addition, with time, miners have gradually switched to new electricity resources and they aim at cheaper as well as more environmental friendly, renewable resources.
Anyway, take this discussion to look back at what satoshi wrote 12 years ago.
Right. Otherwise we couldn't have a finite limit of 21 million coins, because there would always need to be some minimum reward for generating. In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes. I'm sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.
The Proof of Work algorithm and the finite total supply of Bitcoin has pros and cons. It will not have an ending in between great success and failure. Just ends in one way or another. If Bitcoin price can keep jumping into another high level after each halving, miners will keep mining because they will still have profit. That in turn will make the Bitcoin network becomes bigger and bigger as we have been witnessing last 13 years. Else, miners will abandon and Bitcoin network will become less secure and even a dead one.
I know about difficulty retarget after each 2016 blocks but what satoshi wrote is true.
Exactly. PoW may not be perfect, but it's the best thing around for the preservation of decentralization and censorship-resistance. Governments are still against PoW mining, not because it "harms the environment" (which is false), but mostly because they don't want to lose control. They want to prevent as much people as possible from using Bitcoin as an alternative to existing Fiat currencies.
By pushing cryptocurrencies to switch to PoS, governments will be able to make them centralized. We cannot let that happen for the sake of crypto/Blockchain tech. No one knows what the future holds for Bitcoin, so we can only hope for the best. Just my thoughts
I don't even think it is that. Governments (meaning: politicians and central bankers) are against PoW simply because they don't understand it. They are reading the same sensationalist headlines about energy consumption that the rest of us see. These people aren't enthusiasts who take the time to actually educate themselves on Bitcoin and mining and PoW. They just read headlines about Bitcoin using X amount of energy and producing X amount of carbon and they don't never get beyond these surface level statistics. They don't understand the reason for the mining, and they don't understand that the people who are writing the articles or reports they are reading don't know anything more about PoW and Bitcoin mining than they themselves do.
PoW simply has an optics problem. If you don't know what you're talking about and you just look at the amount of energy it uses, yes it looks very bad. If you do know what you're talking about then you understand the reason for the energy use and why it is beneficial to society for a number of different reasons. Just like if you had no idea what computers did and how they helped society but all you knew was how much energy they used globally anyone (at least anyone who gives a damn about the environment and the well-being of society) would be outraged. It's just pure ignorance on the topic that causes people, politicians or anyone else, to hate PoW and think Bitcoin should switch to PoS. I mean the very fact that they believe Bitcoin CAN switch to PoS, or the fact that they think if Bitcoin doesn't then just another crypto CAN and SHOULD replace Bitcoin shows that they have zero specific knowledge on the topic of Bitcoin and Crypto.
I very much doubt there are many politicians or even central bankers that understand the difference between PoW and PoS other than one uses a lot of energy and the other doesn't. So I doubt much or any of the opposition to PoW is because governments want Bitcoin to be weaker through PoS. It's just the optics of the energy use that is the problem.
PoW doesn't have an energy problem. It has an optics problem. And because of that optics problem there is so much misinformation that has been spread about PoW, which makes it really easy to think PoW does have an energy problem. The answer to PoW's problem is simply educating the public and politicians about how PoW really works and why the claims that it is wasteful are nonsensical.
