I was wondering:
1. Can Bitcoin change to POS if wanted to by the community?
2. Is POS really an advantage (if it is - is it an advantage because it saves energy, or because it diffuses power)?
Thank you!
1.
A Proof Of Stake can be done the variations of how it can be done can be debated from simply owning the coin and running a node to receive some rewards every block aka completely movable stake rewards.
https://just-dice.com/#a27 (IN FAQ)
Requiring a certain amount of coins to have a staking position as an example a node with a 1000 coin minimum investment to be rewarded a portion of the miner rewards. The rest would be non-rewarded nodes.
https://www.dash.org/masternodes2/To dedicating your node exclusively to staking in order to receive rewards and as a result needing to park your coins for a certain time period before rewards begin to be distributed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake#Coin_age_based_selection2. POS is an advantage in that it splits rewards between miners and node operators and compensates them for keeping secure copies of the blockchain it also allows another input in the decisions of the coin instead of only rewarding miners.
Applied to Bitcoin it would result in a fork due to the likely need to change the block reward to compensate users based on the format involved, it would ensure more reliability in the long run due to the incentive to receive rewards by operating a full node. Where current node operators receive no rewards unless they are a mining pool leading to quicker centralization and node concentration.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_StakeIn this case while it is likely some nodes would move to the new chain that offers rewards the miners may not like splitting rewards and the mining difficulty will adjust proportionately at the time of the fork based on the value of the coin.