On the other hand, it is often said that there will be no new blockchain that achieves what Bitcoin has achieved: Being distributed without a premine that makes the founders rich and with no way for the people in power to inflate the supply.
What would happen is an ERC-20 token would be created that is distributed just as Bitcoin. In a way that everyone who holds Bitcoin automatically owns the same amount of this token? A fork of Bitcoin on the Ethereum blockchain, so to say.
The centralized version is called WBTC [1] and there are several less centralized versions as well, such as renBTC [2].
Once you've wrapped your bitcoin, it opens up a lot more possibilities, such as using it as collateral for loans or providing it as liquidity in DeFi. It brings actual usability to bitcoin beyond just as a store of value (hodl) or payment mechanism. Projects like Badger Finance [3] have been working for over a year now on this area.
No. Here's why.
Ethereum is already a pre-mined, VC fuelled project that is compromised by the fact that it was able to reverse its the hack due to the DAO hack situation to cater to these investors who lost money. If another giant hack like that was to happen again, it seems that the founders can do just that again; something the Bitcoin maxis would reject and detest.
I guess this question is best answered by them, especially by randomhodler84. I would say Bitcoin does not need to be replaced as a ERC-20 token and I'd just leave it alone to them.
Tokenising Bitcoin won't achieve anything.
But in regards to your question, someone has already made a POS Bitcoin coin called Bitcoin Green in 2017.
Whitepaper is link is available here https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin-green
"Bitcoin Green (BITG) is a sustainable cryptocurrency modeled after Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision for Bitcoin. It is a decentralized, peer-to-peer transactional currency designed to offer a solution to the problematic exponential increase in energy consumed by Bitcoin and other proof-of-work currencies. Proof-of-work mining is environmentally unsustainable due to the electricity used by high-powered mining hardware. Bitcoin Green utilizes an energy efficient proof-of-stake algorithm, can be mined on any computer, and will never require specialized mining equipment. The Green Protocol offers a simple solution to Bitcoin sustainability issues and provides a faster, more scalable blockchain that is better suited for daily transactional use."
What happened to Bitcoin Green? It is dead. Why? Because people don't want a Bitcoin POS. Maybe someone owning 16% of the supply had something to do with it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190809182919/https://bitg.org/
One last thing: PoS will NEVER be as much as good as PoW. So please document yourself a little bit more regarding energy consumption and what Bitcoin CAN help solving.
Nothing is black or white.
- dilute overall value of BTC if it was a 1:1 airdrop (this could be avoided by maybe minting the ERC20 version after providing a proof of burn of real BTC)
- get backlash from BTC maxis who attribute its value to the fact that BTC is secure thanks to PoW, or that Ethereum blockchain relies on an asset that has traits of a security, etc.
- uncertainty related to risk of incorrect smart contract implementation, entity behind it, etc.
These factors could cause a lot of volatility to both tokens, and only one of them would prevail in the long term (historically I would bet it would follow similar path of BCH or BSV, or gazillion other BTC killers)