Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

This means you're an "engineer" but not yet an economist.

Try to study economics if you're really serious about your career in cryptocurrency area, you'll find yourself thinking completely differently. At least you'll get to a point where you don't make a wholesale criticism like this but can say "I know it would be better to have a tech that consumes less energy, but I also understand why it's not a trivial issue, because physics and economics."

One of the biggest fallacies in the history of economics that repeats itself over and over and over again is that people make decisions based on what they can see but they neglect what they can't see that happens as a result of what they can see.

As much as I would like to see PoS work, it may just be the case is that at the end of the day, PoS and PoW are the same in the grand scheme of things, not because of some greedy people with financial interest but because of physics. It's hard to make sense of this unless you study economics, no matter how great of an engineer you are.

[Edit] I hope my comment works as a wakeup call for those of you who are open minded enough to learn a piece of the puzzle that's obviously missing from your mindset (I shared it because once I learned it, I was so regretful for not having studied even a little bit of economics in my life until now), but looking at all the downvotes, looks like most people don't like to hear what they don't like to hear. I don't really mind, suit yourself. But just remember "Cryptocurrency" is "Crypto" + "Currency", which means it's not just CS, but also economics.

the economist would say...

"affordable" is a opinion.

the market price is the market price, if you want one you have to pay more.

you are not entitled to a good at the price you think is "fair"

Newton's 3rd law:

Proof of Work and Proof of Stake both waste tons of energy, and of course, the entire economic system both of them are trying to replace also waste tons of energy.

The problem is, Proof of Work is very objective and measurable, which is why most people criticize Bitcoin for its waste of energy since it's so easy to measure.

But proof of stake and the legacy economic system both lack such objective measures, which is why it's hard to compare them. The term "stake" itself is subjective and doesn't take into account the economic ripple effect it can trigger as a result.

And these ripple effects DO exist, it's just that most people are not aware of them and just take for granted. Which is why I think it's crucial that you study the history of money before you can confidently say you understand "how money works".

This is not to say proof of stake won't work. It's just saying that there's a high chance that there's hidden cost to proof of stake which in the long run can map to the amount of energy wasted by proof of stake, which is backed by newton's 3rd law. You can't create energy. Everything that happens on earth is simply a transfer of limited amount of energy from the sun.

If this sounds all woo-woo to you, that's why I suggest studying economics.

I personally think the only way to overcome energy consumption is to come up with innovation that's as different from newtonian physics to quantum physics.

In a situation where there's a demand for a certain type of goods, those who create those goods are going to profit.

Comparing crypto mining to a war is unnecessarily evokative and manipulative.

Switch, no. The ASIC miners would never vote for something that would destroy half of their investment. A fork could totally happen. That's what Bitcoin Gold did by forking the blockchain to using the Equihash algorithm.