> Is there anything actually wrong with PoW?

There’s more wrong with PoW besides just environmental effects. PoW creates different incentives for a blockchain’s miners than for its users. Often these are conflicting, and have a tendency to gridlock the protocol development. This is especially pronounced today in Ethereum where the majority of users are in favor of certain protocol upgrades that would scale throughput, but miners are opposed to it because it comes at an economic cost to them.

There’s no inherent reason for this dichotomy between users and miners: if it’s the same people using the protocol as securing it, you’d expect to have better outcomes for everyone. PoS makes it so that the users are also the ones securing the protocol. It’s not _perfect_ alignment, but it is much more aligned than the miner/user split in POW.

If actual, real consumers and professionals can't buy gear because it's being hoarded by miners, yeah, that's pretty wasteful (as in, a thing that consumes vast resources without benefiting very many people).

Agreed. ASICs have really destroyed the spirit of mining, and may hint that the Bitcoin style PoW algorithms are in fact not a senible type of proof.

Memory-hard PoW algorithms, rather than computational ones, might be one way to reduce the amount of energy. Memory is expensive regardless of whether you make ASICs or use regular PCs.

Heaven forbid the manufacturers actually, you know, increase production to meet the demand for their hardware.

Haha. That doesn't always work.

The present demand is spurred by the boom phase of a potential boom-bust cycle (similar to oil). You have two (actually more) sources of demand: crypto, conventional buyers (retail and industry customers). If they adjust production upward (which requires an investment of capital) to meet the present demand then they reduce their profit, prices will go up (at least a bit) to compensate. But they also face another risk: what if there's a bust? If the crypto demand for hardware bottoms out (whether because of a change in crypto or having satisfied the demand) they will be left with excess capacity and potentially excess inventory. The increased production capacity may be able to be redirected to other productive endeavors, or it may just end up idle. And the excess inventory has to be sold off at a potential loss as the hardware becomes worth less and less as each day passes (plus holding inventory costs money).

Instead, if they leave production as is (or only increase it slightly) they can virtually guarantee their products will sell out and increase the prices because they know people will continue to buy it. Obviously, the retail and industry customers get screwed because they have less profit to make (if any) directly off the hardware purchase, but the miners will continue to buy almost without regard to the price because their profits (presently) justify the investment.

A failure of tether would certainly cause a ton of market volatility, but there's enough tether substitutes for the markets to adjust pretty quickly. Sure, the failure might freeze a lot of funds and depress market caps a bit in the process.

Personally I doubt it. Look at the market volumes -- everyone who wants to trade shitcoins just does it with BTC pairs, and most of the big boy exchanges support USD-BTC directly.. tether was a good idea when exchanges didn't want to mess with USD but that's not really the case anymore.

I think for many people it's still hard to temporarily and quickly exit a long BTC or long ETH position, but daytraders want to do this with great frequency.

This is doubly true for people outside the US, not to mention people who are trying to skirt capgain taxes. Of course, an argument could also be made that a tether failure would cause people to flee to BTC or ETH and paradoxically cause prices to rise.