Kyle McDonald told CoinDesk that authorities and investors may eventually discover Proof-of-Work was never required.

Independent researcher and artist. Kyle McDonald asserted in an interview with CoinDesk that The Merge, Ethereum’s impending conversion to a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, will be a turning point for the cryptocurrency sector.
According to estimates from the Ethereum Foundation, PoS will consume 99.95% less energy. If this technology lives up to its potential, investors and regulators will likely conclude that PoW was never necessary.
He urged investors to sell Bitcoin immediately during the interview, claiming that the network will be stuck with PoW indefinitely due to a lack of “coordination.” McDonald also said:
“When you’re moving from a system that is about generating as many random numbers as fast as possible with 10 million [graphic processing units] across the world, to a system that’s running on a few thousand computers that are pretty low energy, it’s going to make a huge difference.”
McDonald’s interview, as you might expect, received negative feedback on social media, with several users doubting his point of view. Billy Markus, a co-founder of Dogecoin, said:
McDonald did acknowledge that The Merge might have an impact on NFT collectors, particularly if miners are successful in causing an Ethereum hard fork that retains PoW.

Duplicate NFTs might be produced as a result, which would allow something like a Bored Ape to exist on two different blockchains. McDonald cautioned that in such a case, the value of high-end collectibles might be diminished.
The Ethereum blockchain will permanently switch from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus system to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism as part of the Merge update, which aims to save energy and offer sharding features.