Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

&gt; Why? Because Ethereum isn’t just a store-of-value. The Ethereum network also contains smart contracts that execute native code on the blockchain.<p>It&#x27;s funny when things are presented this way. Ethereum was never intended to be a store of value. It&#x27;s a distributed computer that needs its own token economy in order to charge &quot;hosting costs&quot; to the computational agents running on it, and to allow those agents to trade work done for other agents for transfer of &quot;hosting costs.&quot;<p>Ethereum would still be doing what it&#x27;s designed to do, even if the price of ETH tanked. (In fact, dapp developers would probably <i>prefer</i> ETH to tank, since that&#x27;d mean transactions would be cheaper and less crowded by speculative traders and selfish miners.)

&gt; A vibrant ecosystem of banking functions, asset management, trading exchanges, and more have sprung from this, requiring Ethereum to quickly respond to external events and triggers.<p>That&#x27;s a bit of a stretch isn&#x27;t it? Other than speculation and money laundering, I don&#x27;t think any dapps have gained any traction at all, let alone a vibrant ecosystem.

As an outsider to the blockchain world, I would be more interested to know why proof-of-stake is not used by Ethereum yet.<p>Found one article on the subject: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;ibbc-io&#x2F;the-beautiful-complexity-of-pos-338cfc340eaa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;ibbc-io&#x2F;the-beautiful-complexity-of-pos-3...</a>

&gt; [With PoS, Ethereum would lose] the baggage of wasting the electricity of a small city to keep itself running.<p>&quot;Small city&quot; sounds suspiciously small. Last time I checked, Bitcoin had the same electricity consumption as the entire country of Austria. I can believe that Ethereum has less miners, but by that over 2 magnitudes?

A number of blockchains already have proof of stake:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tezos.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tezos.com&#x2F;</a> for one is pretty cool

So Muir Glacier is not mentioned anywhere in the article text.

Given that they keep postponing the transition to PoS, wouldn&#x27;t it be smarter to remove the artificial difficulty increase and make the network more efficient?