| Ethereum is working to address a lot of those points. When it switches to Proof of Stake (beacon chain is already live), energy costs will drop significantly (talking < 100 watts / node)... Just doing minimum to process blocks, no wasteful mining. That means network has to pay less in block reward under PoS, so inflation drops to 1% or less. Eip-1559 upgrade this summer will also start "burning" a portion of fees. Estimates have this around 0.5% - 1.5% deflation. Combine those features together, and Ethereum should have long term issuance at around 0% indefinitely, while still paying for validators to secure it. It's a feedback mechanism too... If usage goes down, burn drops, supply inflates slightly, stimulating use, increasing burn again. The idea is to make an elastic self-securing system. I don't understand where the pyramid scheme is in that... The money being paid out to validators will by nature barely cover costs (otherwise more people will validate, reducing margins to match). Since anyone can join, and the network punishes correlated misbehavior, that incentivizes decentralization and wide disbursement of block rewards. --- In the case of topic here, spare CPU cycles will no longer be valuable to exploit under PoS. The valuble qualities will be availability and uptime... Which won't be had by exploring in-broswer mining scripts, or CI exploits. |