Proof of stake doesn't require that kind of investment. Ethereum for example has a large decentralized set of validators like Bitcoin, but runs on regular computers with the energy usage of a few hundred average American households. It's similar to any other internet protocol.
Economic value is whatever people are willing to pay for, and I do mean "pay for," not "invest in." If you want to use applications on the Ethereum network, you have to pay ETH to do it and the ETH gets burned. As long as people keep doing that, the economic value is demonstrably there. Whether that equates to any other kind of value at this point, I won't try to argue, but for significant periods after proof-of-stake rolled out, ETH has had a P/E comparable to some high-growth stocks. This does not apply to Bitcoin, which doesn't have the burn mechanism or much in the way of applications.
ETH and BTC are the two cryptocurrencies with ETFs available. It's unfortunate that even now, so many investment professionals don't understand their differences.
What I don’t like about eth is when you think extremes and I mean 10000x supply growth of eth or 99.9999% burn all of these are possible scenarios which is not a good idea. Remember how eth forked to save someone’s crypto? Basically defeating the whole idea of crypto currency.
Bitcoin on the other hand - hardcoded, meaning supply can’t change.
ETH's supply growth without the burn maxes out at about 2% annually, in the case of almost the entire supply being staked. That's still less than major fiat currencies. Its current growth rate is less than Bitcoin's.
For the burn to be so extreme, the demand for transaction space would have to be much greater than the space available. Since they're also making large improvements to scaling, with the roadmap going to millions of transactions per second and the hardest parts already done, that also seems unlikely.
As for the infamous fork, that happened in Ethereum's first year and it didn't change the ETH supply. Nothing like it has happened in the nine years since. Bitcoin forked when it was eighteen months old, and that actually did change the Bitcoin supply.
Economic value is whatever people are willing to pay for, and I do mean "pay for," not "invest in." If you want to use applications on the Ethereum network, you have to pay ETH to do it and the ETH gets burned. As long as people keep doing that, the economic value is demonstrably there. Whether that equates to any other kind of value at this point, I won't try to argue, but for significant periods after proof-of-stake rolled out, ETH has had a P/E comparable to some high-growth stocks. This does not apply to Bitcoin, which doesn't have the burn mechanism or much in the way of applications.
ETH and BTC are the two cryptocurrencies with ETFs available. It's unfortunate that even now, so many investment professionals don't understand their differences.