It is technically possible. “Materially”, Bitcoin is nothing if a record of transactions and the wallet balances it implies. Anybody can come and fork Bitcoin into a new chain which preserves the transactions but changes the implementation and/or the features (as happened with Bitcoin Cash).
The real question is what people believe to be valuable. In this case, what they perceive to be the “real Bitcoin” (currency is a social contract, yadda yadda).
A transition from PoW to PoS must thus find broad community consensus, in particular leadership consensus (but broader consensus is also needed so as to prevent the value of Bitcoin from collapsing).
So who controls the decentralized “uncensorable” currency? Mostly, the miners. The Bitcoin foundation also has power, but as I understand the two are (or at least were) fairly enmeshed.
Of course, miners don’t want to transition to PoS, as they would lose their golden goose.
Therefore, it’s likely that a transition from PoW would only happen if it is necessary to fend off an existential thread to Bitcoin (which would make mining equally worthless). That could be regulation on PoW, or simply the Ethereum narrative taking over. The point is that the writing has to be on the wall that if Bitcoin doesn’t transition, then it is headed to zero, even if it’s on a longer timeframe.
Being much more speculative, I’m going to venture and say that a long-decline of Bitcoin is unlikely. At best, there will be an ambiguous uncertainty period where the Bitcoin faith machine will churn faster than ever, but some proposals for PoS transition will start to emerge and be taken seriously (currently, they’re quite unpopular). The ambiguous period will either end with PoS adoption, or with a rapid collapse.
A transition to PoS would probably entail a long phase-out of mining, probably by means of decreased rewards so that established players can amortize their hardware investments.
It’s also possible that a PoS bitcoin fork is created (just like Bitcoin Cash) and ends up overtaking the original as the “real Bitcoin” in people’s mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if such a fork already exists, but timing & support is crucial. A 8-year old forks in 5 years is not going to cut it — it needs to arrive on the scene with as much publicity as possible.
It is technically possible. “Materially”, Bitcoin is nothing if a record of transactions and the wallet balances it implies. Anybody can come and fork Bitcoin into a new chain which preserves the transactions but changes the implementation and/or the features (as happened with Bitcoin Cash).
The real question is what people believe to be valuable. In this case, what they perceive to be the “real Bitcoin” (currency is a social contract, yadda yadda).
A transition from PoW to PoS must thus find broad community consensus, in particular leadership consensus (but broader consensus is also needed so as to prevent the value of Bitcoin from collapsing).
So who controls the decentralized “uncensorable” currency? Mostly, the miners. The Bitcoin foundation also has power, but as I understand the two are (or at least were) fairly enmeshed.
Of course, miners don’t want to transition to PoS, as they would lose their golden goose.
Therefore, it’s likely that a transition from PoW would only happen if it is necessary to fend off an existential thread to Bitcoin (which would make mining equally worthless). That could be regulation on PoW, or simply the Ethereum narrative taking over. The point is that the writing has to be on the wall that if Bitcoin doesn’t transition, then it is headed to zero, even if it’s on a longer timeframe.
Being much more speculative, I’m going to venture and say that a long-decline of Bitcoin is unlikely. At best, there will be an ambiguous uncertainty period where the Bitcoin faith machine will churn faster than ever, but some proposals for PoS transition will start to emerge and be taken seriously (currently, they’re quite unpopular). The ambiguous period will either end with PoS adoption, or with a rapid collapse.
A transition to PoS would probably entail a long phase-out of mining, probably by means of decreased rewards so that established players can amortize their hardware investments.
It’s also possible that a PoS bitcoin fork is created (just like Bitcoin Cash) and ends up overtaking the original as the “real Bitcoin” in people’s mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if such a fork already exists, but timing & support is crucial. A 8-year old forks in 5 years is not going to cut it — it needs to arrive on the scene with as much publicity as possible.