Bitcoin Going To Switch To POS?
Could this really take place?
According to Niklas Nikolajsen, the founder of Swiss crypto broker Bitcoin Suisse, this is a likely event sometime in Bitcoin's future.
He believes that once Ethereum proves the concept, Bitcoin will follow suit.
At the core, the issue is that Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work (POW) is uses too much energy. The leading cryptocurrency has come under a great deal of attack for the energy consumed.
Of course, this is a bit misleading. As Nikolajsen notes, what major city doesn't have a skyscraper occupied by a bank with all their screens and servers? Along the same lines, Facebook have massive server rooms, all sucking energy.
The Proof-of-Work/Proof-of-Stake debate has raged since the introduction of the alternate method. Proponents of the first feel that POS simply does not offer enough security. At the same time, Proof-of-Work might pose scaling issues. POW networks tend to be much slower than its counterparts.
This assertion is a radical idea. Many feel that Bitcoin should not stray from the original intention as set down in the original White Paper.
Bitcoin switching to POS would be a giant victory for that system. The security is something that still needs to be validated especially in the eyes of many Bitcoin advocated.
Time will tell how this unfolds but Nikolajsen certainly feels that way.
I don't believe that will happen, people don't want to change the fundamental of the root.
I've never really understood how things are supposed to work when the last bitcoin is mined which is in the not too terribly distant future. I would think transaction fees would skyrocket at that point without some kind of change.
The thing is that the amount of mined bitcoin, in dollars, has never really gone down during the halvenings.
Because bitcoin keeps doubling faster than its halving.
When we get to the end of mineable bitcoin, bitcoin will probably be so valuable that the transaction fees will be well worth it.
EVERYONE will be box mining.
That is not to say that sending a bitcoin will not cost $10,000. But when you are moving millions of dollars worth, $10,000 is nothing.
Maybe... I'm not convinced that Bitcoin will be worth anything if it cost $10,000 for a transaction (or even $100). Practically, it becomes a lot less useful. And it's not like new and better cryptos won't continue to come along over the next 100 years. It will be interesting to see what happens, that's for sure.
Well, what has been said by people that peer into the future is that bitcoin basically becomes the instrument of international settlements and corporations paying each other.
They already pay huge amounts to transfer money.
On top of that, they pay huge amounts to swap currencies.
Compared to that, $10,000 transactions is cheap, Cheap, CHEAP.
We, the little people, will use other things.
Probably BCash, Litecoin and Digibyte.
Plus there will be interactivity layers that will basically make it so you can spend any token and the receiver can get any tokens they want.
There will be a layer, like lightning network that will congregate and pool lots of little transactions and write them to the parent chain once a day or once a week.
The last bitcoin mined will be in around 100 years from now.
The last Bitcoin will be mined in 2140. That's 120 years from now. Bitcoin is eleven years old. 120 years is an eternity in the space. Given the exponential growth curve in the power of information technology, there is no telling what will happen in 120 years. I predict the world will change much more than it has changed in the last 2000 years in the next 120 years.
Disaster will come when you mess with the code! PoW may appear to use lots of energy, but PoS is weaker as a code in my opinion. Don't mess with the blockchain.
I don't believe that will ever happen. PoW is more secure and decentralized than PoS. In Bitcoin, miners and holders are two distinct sets of people. In PoS, your wallet balance has direct influence over network security. The distribution of Bitcoin held in different addresses is very top-heavy with whales dominating it. If Bitcoin whales controlled not only the token distribution but network security as well, I think a lot of people would lose confidence in the system. Besides, Bitcoin can scale through trustless off-chain second layer solutions.
Ethereum is a smart contract platform. Smart contracts are executed on the blockchain level, which means that second layer scaling solutions are off the table. Sharding, sidechains - or changing the consensus mechanism to PoS - are the only scaling solutions available. It makes much more sense to migrate Ethereum to the PoS consensus model.