How does the bitcoin community solve this problem? Is migrating to a proof-of-stake system viable in the long term? Would doing so affect the value of bitcoin as an asset? Would it improve it's value as anything else?
Their mainnet has been out for a month and people are able to mine ("farm") using low-energy hardware. There are people that are farming petabytes of storage with a single Raspberry Pi. I myself am using an old crappy laptop with some unused hard drives I had around the house.
PoS is not the path forward. Reducing energy is not the path forward. Clean energy generation is the only way forward.
1 megawatt can smelt a lot of metal that can build bridges and electric vehicle parts, for example.
Whereas energy production is finite. Whereas BTC and it's ilk steal from the mouths of babes. Whereas BTC and it's ilk currently cause real externalities, in the real physical communal world we share.