First of all. I don't agree with MarsMan and I think what he is doing is straightforward market manipulation.
But one thing is o/c right in this whole mess. Proof of Work can't be Bitcoins destination. First of all one question is if it really still fulfills its function for decentralization. Is a system truly decentralized or distributed when there is already just a handful of groups that would just need to agree on common terms?
Energy might be another factor and important as well, so a less power hungry solution might be great, on the other side it could be very healthy to the renewables industry if all miners would be forced to use only green energy, since this would generate a significant amount of money flowing into those industries. But I don't see any technical way to really enforce that.
I am a long term user since Bitcoins inception, but I stopped following the development for some years now and hold most of my assets I bought for a few cents years ago and just do some trading from time to time. So I might be not up to date if there are efforts to move away from PoW. Can someone give me an update on this? If Bitcoin is not considering to move and evolve, what are your takes on this and why would one cling to much to PoW, just b/c of the hard fork it requires? Or are the alternatives still not mature enough?
POW is the only proven way to secure the network. Read the whitepaper and read into older implementations of fully decentralized e-currencies. Securing the network in a decentralized way and solving the byzantine problem is nothing short of a nightmare but somehow the genius that is Satoshi and the early devs solved it. Anything else (POS, DAG, etc) is gravely experimental and bitcoin is nearly a $1 trillion network. It's not worth the risk. POW can be improved with greener mining solutions and increasing transaction throughput through L2, L3, etc. Overall POW is not a problem, it is a beautiful conception that has worked near flawlessly for over a decade.