I wondered about this for a long time as well. Exchanges, RPC providers like Infura, wallet developers, dapp websites, etc., wouldn't endorse such a fork, so it wouldn't gain adoption. It might still happen, but it would fail to capture much value, similar to Ethereum Classic.
If the crypto crash has demonstrated anything, it's that there's an enormously incestuous relationship between these organizations. We have exchanges running mining operations, market participants investing in crypto mining companies, etc.
A massive economic implosion in the mining community is going to have knock-on effects throughout the ecosystem, and I can imagine market participants not wanting that to happen.
In the end I suspect you're right, but I don't think it's safe to say that only the miners are interested in preserving the status quo, and I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that a major PoW-based fork won't live on and divide the ecosystem.
> but I don't think it's safe to say that only the miners are interested in preserving the status quo
I also am sure the miners will keep the PoW based chain alive. But I have trouble finding reasons why users, developers and businesses would support the PoW based chain in the long term.
Another reason that I’ve seen brought up is that miners aren’t so coordinated. Somebody will have to actually fork the code, remove the difficulty bomb, change the magic parameters to not interfere with the PoS P2P network, etc. Then they have to get enough miners on board to use that particular fork. I think it’s a weak argument, but so far I haven’t seen any coordinated effort to continue mining after the Merge, so it could be a factor.
I think it boils down to a coordination/signalling problem again. Miners want to mine on the fork that they expect to succeed, but it will only succeed if it gets listed on exchanges, exchanges will only list it after it gains serious adoption, but it will only get serious adoption if miners agree on a fork, etc.
A historical example of this is SegWit2x in Bitcoin. It was originally proposed as a protocol upgrade, seemed to gain broad support, but miners and exchanges weren’t universally signalling that they would adopt it, and in the end everybody chickened out, and the change failed to be adopted.
> But I have trouble finding reasons why users, developers and businesses would support the PoW based chain in the long term.
I explained why: Cross-investment within the ecosystem.
If, I dunno, say Coinbase has a large investment in a mining operation (and I'm completely making this up, to be clear), they're not gonna want a move to PoS because it'll destroy that investment.
We know for a fact that there's a ton of this type of cross-investment in the ecosystem, as evidenced by the ripple effects from the collapse of organizations like 3AC. It's not at all unreasonable to conclude that similar relationships could create incentives to keep the miners solvent.
Fwiw, Coinbase and Kraken both hold large amounts of staked ETH for their customers, and skim off a percentage of the staking rewards. They won't be able to access those profits until about six months after the merge. So they both have an interest in the PoS chain doing well.
Anyone in the community who's been paying attention has been well aware that staking was coming. The staking network has been running in parallel since December 2020, and about 12% of the current supply of ETH is deposited on it.
From a user perspective it doesn't matter all that much whether it's PoW or PoS, right? I see equally little reason for a user to choose the PoS chain over the PoW one.
Usability is a little better on the PoS chain. Blocks come out every 12 seconds, instead of randomly with just an average time of 13 seconds.
The PoS chain takes less than a minute to converge to a state where it's very unlikely for your transaction to revert, and in 12 minutes your transaction is finalized, meaning it can't revert without destroying a large percentage of staked ETH.
PoS ETH will have the researcher and dev community building on top of it for another decade or so. There's a long list of further improvements in the roadmap, including major increases in scalability.
Most of the ecosystem is moving to PoS. The popular rollups will be connected to the PoS chain, not to PoW. Major stablecoins backed by off-chain assets have already said they'll be backing the PoS chain, not PoW. Etc.
You're right, if users disregard the difference in energy consumption there is little reason for them to choose the PoS chain over the PoW one.
For devs and businesses the PoS one seems to matter though, I think it is likely the activity and innovation will be there in the end.
Also a user would have to make an effort to keep using the PoW one AFAIK.
