How exactly do you think you could dethrone Bitcoin, overcoming its gigantic first-mover advantage?
I believe BTC could only come down with the rest of that "economy".
Side-chains dont solve the problem no matter how many and how performant they are. On the main-chain the fees need to eventually cover the cost of running the network i.e. the whole energy, hardware and human labor. Currently this is still mostly paid by the block reward (aka paid by inflation). This pays about a quarter million USD every 10 minutes. It doesn't need much common sense to figure out that if the combined fees of all peoples transaction need to result in a quarter million USD every 10 minute then transaction can not be cheap. Bitcoin is currently running on subsidy by its own block reward that pays about as much as google pays for operation.
The average Tx fee is currently a few dollar but a subsidy of about 140 dollar is added form the block reward. Non-PoW based systems have outperformed bitcoin in terms of transaction for years with average Tx fees of less than a cent. Shouldn't this be enough incentivize? Surely it is for thous who actuality want to use the system. The gamblers and maxis will probably hodl their bag forever but once it loses market relevant it will sharply become insecure as well and the whole thing should collapse. Might take another 10 years, who knows but it eventually has to fail. Its like ICE cars vs. EVs it was always just a matter of time but it felt like it took forever.
>How exactly do you think you could dethrone Bitcoin, overcoming its gigantic first-mover advantage?
If you look at the bigger picture BTC loses market share and there is no sign that this will change. The gains are below average so people who only gamble have an incentive to gamble with something else.
In practice this won't happen, because PoS coins don't deliver the same features (security, decentralization, permissionless) or the market doesn't believe they do.
Also the savings with PoS are not passed to the users of the cryptocurrency, but to the stakers, or big holders of the cryptocurrency. How do we even know, that these people will spend the money they make using some more enviromentally friendly way? Maybe they just buy lambos with the money and fly around with private jets.
Mining is quite small amount of the total transacted amount of BTC daily, and people are willing to pay the cost. If you want to replace Bitcoin with some more enviromentally friendly thing, you have to offer the same capabilities (or better). PoS coins fail to deliver this.
>and people are willing to pay the cost.
No they are not. BTC runs on the block reward not on the fees. Without block reward the average Tx fee would be like 150 USD. (Not accounting for the fact that this would significantly drop the number of Tx which would then raise the cost for the rest of the transaction even higher.)
It's been what, 2 or 3 years since decent PoS designs were introduced to the market? The crypto market is still trying to tell the difference between their right foot and a private key. Give it a few more years and eventually the market will settle convincingly on a design it values the most, be it PoW, PoS, or something else.
In the mean time, it's silly imo to say that the market has decided. The crypto space is still a volatile bloodbath of old chains dying and new competitors rising.