[latchkey]

Large scale ETH miner here who uses excess hydro. ETH uses PoW, but the long term plan for ETH is to move to PoS.

I'm going to address one large difference between ETH PoW and Bitcoin PoW that people rarely talk about, which is the hardware differences.

ETH did something relatively smart and tried to peg the hardware to GPUs. This had the effect of ensuring that there would not be the same speed race wars that (imho) plague Bitcoin. Every new generation of hardware obsoletes the last. You don't need the fastest/latest GPUs to be ROI efficient.

The system isn't perfect, people have made ASICs, but it turns out (for now) that they aren't much more cost/speed efficient than just using GPUs due to the memory hardness of the ethash PoW algo.

As a result, the limited number of GPUs also limits the size of the growth of the network. They are also more difficult to setup and run at scale than Bitcoin ASICs. Finally, GPUs can go back to doing other things (gaming/ai/ml/rendering/...) and generally won't become e-waste.

[sharperguy]

PoS is never going to work. They have been delaying it for over 5 years now. There is no way to switch to a proof of stake system that has the same guarentees as proof of work.

On the other hand, most applications of ethereum don't need a blockchain or proof of work at all, since they are inherently vulnerable to attacks by centralized parties.