The consensus mechanism of Ethereum has shifted from the previous POW to the current POS, which has always been a point I don't quite understand.

The earliest explanation I saw for this transition came from Vitalik himself, who suggested that this change was for environmental protection and energy conservation…

Regarding this explanation, in that era, I thought:

I can't say this explanation is completely unreasonable, but it sounds more like a viewpoint that caters to a certain kind of Western leftist political correctness.

Therefore, I had a rather forced attitude towards it.

However, recently, with the exponential growth of energy consumption due to artificial intelligence applications, along with my reinforced recognition of Ethereum's "use value," I am increasingly inclined to believe that this transition of Ethereum is correct and necessary.

The exponential growth of energy consumption due to artificial intelligence applications is something I believe the vast majority of readers have already seen various concrete evidence of from different information channels.

Among this evidence, what impressed me the most was a piece of information recently revealed by Microsoft's CEO in an interview: Microsoft currently has a large number of NVIDIA GPUs piled up in warehouses that cannot be used, and the fundamental reason is that the power supply system cannot keep up.

In addition, several major tech giants in the U.S. are now increasingly investing heavily in building small nuclear power plants to ensure the energy supply for data centers, which is an undeniable strong driving factor.

It is clear that the bottleneck for artificial intelligence applications has gradually shifted from GPUs to the energy sector.

Moreover, there is another interesting piece of information circulating in the industry:

More and more Bitcoin mining farms are beginning to transition to data center operations.

I believe this business transition should not be understood merely as a commercial phenomenon, but rather we should pay attention to a potential risk hidden behind it:

If at some point in the future (or is it happening now?), the revenue from Bitcoin mining does not keep up with the income from data center operations, what does that mean?

That means more and more miners will convert their mining farms into data centers, and more and more miners will withdraw from maintaining the Bitcoin network, leading to a significant reliance on energy for Bitcoin's security barrier being eroded and weakened by artificial intelligence applications.

Such a risk did not exist during Satoshi Nakamoto's era because there was no widespread application of artificial intelligence at that time, nor the future exponential growth potential that artificial intelligence now demonstrates.

Of course, this risk is merely my current speculation.

I do not have accurate data to compare the breakeven points and business switching thresholds between mining operations and data center operations, so I cannot definitively determine whether this risk exists and, if so, under what circumstances it would arise.

However, I believe this risk can no longer be ignored. Moreover, I think as we move forward, when artificial intelligence truly produces blockbuster applications similar to WeChat, this risk will definitely increase.

Therefore, from the perspective of competition for limited energy, future artificial intelligence applications are undoubtedly the biggest threat to POW mining. The consensus mechanisms that can mitigate this threat at least include POS.

In the article from the day before yesterday, I listed the "Blue Fox's" vision for the future of Ethereum, one of which is to run nodes on simple, small devices—essentially continuously lowering hardware thresholds and continuously reducing energy consumption has always been what Ethereum has been striving to achieve.

Now it seems that after transitioning to POS, this approach is indeed very likely to mitigate the risks of Ethereum and artificial intelligence in the competition for energy.

This is one aspect.

Secondly, if we consider Ethereum from a broader perspective, since it is an application network, the ecosystem centered around it should ideally be as minimally constrained by the physical world as possible, especially in terms of on-chain transactions for the entire virtual world.

The limitations imposed by energy are a significant constraint from the physical world.

Therefore, as an application protocol, it should strive to avoid such limitations and "detach from the physical" as soon as possible, becoming a "solid foundation" in the virtual world that relies as little on energy as possible.

In summary, whether by coincidence or historical chance, I now increasingly hold a supportive attitude towards Ethereum's transition from POW to POS.

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