With the introduction of PoS, ETH is becoming more and more centralized rather than becoming decentralized. Exchanges like Binance and people like CZ are always willing to control the market and exert huge centralization over the crypto community and this was possibly true when he was willing to do a 51% attack by bribing miners and reversing the bitcoin chain. Nowadays the primary purpose of any cryptocurrency has become a mere speculation, so obviously ETH would shoot up in price if there are more proper developments taking over but on the other hand if there are worse speculations going over and in the process we would be suffering from a bear market. This is why a mineable PoW and ASIC resistant currency like Monero would offer an excellent decentralization while comparing to Bitcoin or a PoS coin like Ethereum.
Ethereum Classic is more or less an useless mineable currency, i.e they are only used for mining and are suffering severe 51% attacks now and then. So probably ETC is geared more towards making money by offering a better mining solution rather than any use cases. ETC becoming decentralized would never make the coin superior to ETH atleast in terms of making profits as ETH provides one among the best platforms on the decentralized web to deploy contracts. This could never be achieved by a centralized chain like BSC but there are still quite a few possibilities DOT might be looking as the future ETH with more scalability and thereby providing similar use cases of ETH.
A mere $5k per coin would place the total valuation of Ethereum at $500 billion, but there are centralized chains like BSC which offers better scalability in deploying contracts so possibly there could be stiff competition for ETH in terms of hitting $5k price.
Exactly. The concentration of ETH's supply among a few stakers (validators) should be a real concern for those supporting the decentralization of Blockchain technology. It seems to me that ETH devs only care about convenience than true decentralization. It's always been about the money, instead of making crypto/Blockchain land a better place. Once ETH becomes a full-fledged PoS cryptocurrency, big exchanges will dominate the Blockchain. I believe that ETH miners will migrate into ETC, making the latter blockchain network bigger and stronger than ever. One thing for sure, is that ETC has been a victim of constant 51% attacks over time. It's hoped that with the ETH 2.0 upgrade, this will no longer become an issue.
Nonetheless, I believe that staking ETH yourself will only be good for making short term profits than anything else. Don't expect to take ETH seriously as the network will become less decentralized over time. ETH will remain actively traded on the market as long as people keep pouring money into it. If you care about decentralization, then I'd suggest you look elsewhere. Mining ETC or even Bitcoin itself might be a better option than staking centralized coins. Just my opinion
