[keymone]

You seem to be convinced there are better ways to implement a distributed consensus mechanism that doesn’t depend on proof of work. Feel free to present it to the world and become the next satoshi. Meanwhile - face the reality. PoW will consume as much energy as is profitable and only market decides that.

[superbrama]

I’m convinced people are searching for it. I’m convinced there’s a huge nouveau academic interest in this area. This just helps to estimate likelihood of bitcoin’s longevity.

Yes, precisely, you always need buyers to push price further. Market decides up or down, miners play along as it makes sense to them. Kind of like the swap over to bcash about a month ago, because it made sense financially.