Not mentioned in the article: Ethereum will be transitioning to proof of stake in the next few months and the large majority of GPU-based mining will go away entirely. Probably will be some great deals on video cards later this year.
Just in time for the beef shortage!
The production proof-of-stake network has been running in parallel for a year and a half, with 10% of all ETH locked up in it.
What's left is the merge with the rest of the network. They've tested the merge on every combination of five execution clients and five staking clients.
They've done about a dozen large test merges on copies of the live network.
They've done the merge on a large long-running testnet used by applications, block explorers, exchanges, etc. Essentially it was a practice run by the whole ecosystem. There were a few minor glitches but it worked well enough to be a success if it'd been the live network.
There are two major testnets left, and if those merge successfully then the next step is production.
Some other PoS systems use delegated proof of stake, where most people just delegate their stake to one of a small number of validating nodes, which could easily cooperate to censor transactions. Ethereum supports a very large number of nodes, due to signature aggregation. Right now there are about 400K individual nodes. Entities of course can have more than one node, but the last estimate I saw of the number of individual entities put it at around 5000. (That was at least six months ago.)
I can't say anything about the absolute code quality however I think we are getting to a point where economic and community pressure forces them to take some risks
> I do not pay for power
I guess you don't run your own solar farm so I assume someone else is paying that for you without knowing.
Hmmmm, I detect a flaw in you plan....