Anywho, are any of you confident that ETh's move to proof of stake won't result in some nasty side effects? This is coming straight out of my own ignorance, but it seems like all I ever hear is "99.95% reduced energy, much wow!" while nobody seems to be able to speak to the actual costs and downsides.
Well Flobee just linked some well written criticism for you, but nobody wants to read. They just want to watch candles go up and down.
Bitmex research also puts out some of the highest quality analysis in this space and is fairly agnostic:
The primary criticism of Ethereum is that it's taking half a trillion (well, used to be half a trillion) of assets into unknown territory by switching to unproven tech. PoS is not well tested. Generally speaking you want to see something working and proven before investing large amounts of capital into it. More complexity = less security = more testing required. Ethereum is migrating to PoS, AND sharding, AND importing their PoW legacy chain to the new one at roughly the same time. If they pull it off that's super bullish. If they fuck it up? Not a risk I want to take. Consider that serious problems may not even manifest until many months after the transition. PoW has 12 years of confidence.
Additionally there is the argument that with PoS, a massive amount of capital is tied up in staking instead of being put to use. That's fine for a smart contracts blockchain I suppose, but not for a store of value blockchain used for buying things that aren't related to smart contracts. It's conceivable that Ethereum could 'flip' bitcoin and become worth more (I doubt it, but whatever) because Ethereum 'does stuff' while bitcoin is still used as the gold replacement coin. Equities are worth more than gold after all. (although Bitcoin continues to get smarter, just at a slower pace)
Ethereum also started with a ridiculously large premine-- 72 million coins. The current circulation is 115m after years of mining. Any other coin doing this would be laughed out of the room but Ethereum has a cool name and an autist cult leader that picked up mandarin in a week or whatever. With PoS you want the coins to be spread out considerably, so a premine is counter to this. Unless of course you're one of the premine ICO buyers or original devs, then you fucking love PoS with the premine, because your cohort will be getting almost all of the newly minted coins from now on and your control over the network increases. PoW miners in contrast are forced to sell the vast majority of what they mine shortly after mining it because of operating costs, thereby diluting ownership. Bitcoin gets less concentrated with time.
If you think wealth concentration isn't a big deal, then consider this: these super large whales who got their coins very very cheap in the early days have the power to take massive dumps on the price at any given time or otherwise have the power to keep the price suppressed. Furthermore they're going to have information before you will. It's also undesirable for a money coin to be concentrated. Bitcoin's dispersion is a huge advantage over rivals as they cannot replicate it.
Another thing to note: People think that miners have all the power in bitcoin. This isn't true. In 2017 a supermajority of miners wanted to increase the block size, but a majority of node operators did not. Miners lost that war, hence why we have Segwit. (is also why bitcoin cash exists and failed) Node operators have a lot of power in bitcoin. With PoS, the power will be entirely in the hands of stakers who must run nodes 24/7 with no downtime; particularly when Ethereum nodes require MUCH beefier systems to run. The largest stakers will be exchanges or places that collectively stake coins for people who can't (or won't) run a node 24/7 (which is basically all the small fish) and they'll have a tremendous amount of influence over the network, unlike bitcoin where exchanges have basically zero.
Lastly, the entire point of these networks is to decentralize control; you can mock us for mentioning Vitalik so much, but the fact that his name is brought up so often is indicative of a problem. The Bitcoin dev in charge of the repo just stepped down recently because he thought he was becoming too much of an authority figure and none of you can even name him. Do you think multibillionaires are going to put the bulk of their generational wealth in the hands of Vitalik? I don't