Miners will jump the ship due to economical reasons.
The next coinbase reward halving in the Bitcoin network will be an important event.
If the Bitcoin price before the halving is at less than double the price needed to achieve a positive ROI, mining will be affected from the halving.
I bet for some mining operations this is true and mining devices will be shut off.
But the halving has another effect.
If the demand for BTC (measured e.g. in BTC per day) remains constant, the halving will lead to increased BTC prices, because only approximately 1,800 BTC will be created per day after the halving (compared to 3,600 BTC daily now).
My prediction for the coinbase reward halving is that in the weeks after the halving it will increase the BTC price by 10% to 30% compared to the weeks before the halving. I expect some more drastic swings as well.
This won’t be enough to operate all miners with positive ROI. They will drop off the Bitcoin network and some of it might mine PPC afterwards.
The coinbase reward halving will increase the centralization of Bitcoin mining.
That is one of the reasons I’d like to see a successful Ethereum and not a rootstock that is dependent on Bitcoin.
Short-term to mid-term the economical situation might look better for rootstock than it does for Ethereum.
Long-term that creates the same dangerous dependency on the BTC price level Bitcoin might once suffer from.
If rootstock can offer similar features Ethereum does offer, but at a lower price, it’s bad for Ethereum and good for rootstock.
Rootstock might easily be ported to e.g. Peercoin reducing the costs for sustaining it by orders of magnitude - who knows.
Either way (with rootstock based on BTC or on PPC) it doesn’t look too good for Ethereum.
It looks like a train wreck waiting to happen.
But I think it will be years from now until it happens.
The Ethereum project is an interesting idea. Would be a pity to see it fail - and all that will be built on top of it.
The transition from PoW to PoS could reduce the costs for sustaining Ethereum by far.
Does anybody know where that’s placed on Ethereum’s agenda?
The start with PoW seems to be related with the time it would have taken to create a PoS system for Ethereum - they didn’t want to wait for that.