just a few ideas / facts
1º Constantinople will be applied in winter 2019. So still 1 year and 2 months away more or less. Many things can happen
2º Reward per block reduced to 2 ETH. If in 1 year ETH is at the same price, it will be an absolute NO GO for miners (although it's already a NO GO).
3º i don't think ETH will survive that long. Technical analysis shows that it's the worst top 10 performing coin. Huge resistances to break 20 day EMA. Many investors are dropping support on ETH and there is a very big lack of investment on ETH right now.
4º this can actually be good news for actual miners. Since this news will discourage people from investing on mining ETH. We have already seen the hashrate reduction from 268.000 GH/s to 252.000GH/s average. In the actual conditions, you have to be really mad, silly and stupid to invest a lot of money in mining a coin that will go unprofitable in 1 year. You´ll not even ROI at current conditions.
5º They obviously want to reduce the amount of coins generated, and begin to take away from the coin those miners, so that the migration to total PoS is done without many people complaining too much.
6º it's to be seen how PoS will reward people. Vitalik has never given numbers of how much money ETH is making out of Smart contracts. If ETH cap is around 20 billion $ and smart contracts have 30 billion, would be the migration to PoS a good idea?? My guess is that the money ETH is getting over smart contracts does not even get close to the value of the coin in the current manipulated market.
7º the real question: will it be worth to stock ETH so that, when PoS is implemented, you get a % of the money in smart contracts?? I think it will be a total NO. Specially when people begin to realise the huge problems ETH has with Scalability and amount of operations per second. Visa can do around 1700 operations per second. ETH only 20 and BTC only 4. If we want crypto to force real money away, ETH and BTC cannot do it.
Someone said, what about other coins?? When ETH goes PoS, a huge amount of GPU will have to search a place to go. There is currently NO PLACE TO GO THAT IS PROFITABLE. And if there is a profitable coin, it will go un profitable once those GPU collapse the pool, or even ASICS and FPGA collapse the market.
Tough days are coming.