In the last year, I've watched Proof of Work slide from the most commonly sought after, highest market cap group of coins based on current coins in existence to being represented by less than half of the top fifteen coins.

Taking its place, we have mostly variants of Proof of Stake coins that, by number, seem to be cornering the cryptocurrency scene.

Let's take a look:


Of this list we have the following coins that are not mineable:

NuBits
BanxShares
Fuelcoin
Stellar
Counterparty
NXT
Bitshares
Ripple

And these that are still mineable:

Bitcoin
Litecoin
Dogecoin
Peercoin
Darkcoin
Namecoin
Monero

Of the list that's still mineable, only two do not have publicly available dedicated hardware designed to eliminate GPU and CPU miners, while five have hardware available to follow an industrial mining process.

So, we now have roughly two coins out the top fifteen marketcaps that are capable of being mined by anyone with reasonably standard computer hardware.

Is Proof of Work dead, as a method to distribute a constant supply of new coins in a manner that requires a constant supply of fresh money?

What happened here?

What does the future hold for both PoW and PoS in terms of the number of coins with the top fifteen market caps based on current emission?

Will PoW become further industrialized, with a hardware race?

How long can Proof of Stake variants hold the top spot in the marketcap race?