You shouldn't take advice from people who don't even know how to spell the names of the networks they're lecturing about. Blockchain has become a buzzword like

You shouldn't take advice from people who don't even know how to spell the names of the networks they're lecturing about. Blockchain has become a buzzword like you mentioned, everyone has an opinion, even people who don't understand anything. But the technology has come a long way since the early Bitcoin days. There is no need to build your own chain, for a fun project you can simply launch a token on existing smart contract platforms such as Ethereum. Building your own chain is complicated if it's not a clone of an existing one, that's not a side project. >My next question is are there downsides to proof-of-stake, and why has bitcoin not moved towards it? There aren't any obvious ones but imo only time will tell. Bitcoiners feel there is a higher centralization risk in PoS. Which is true for some PoS systems but really depends on how exactly set up. Ethereum for example has a significant number of "home stakers" (small-time solo validators), which in Bitcoin simply isn't a thing anymore since it's practically all mining farms. And people in Ethereum are working towards further decentralization whereas Bitcoin Core is more or less ossified. There hasn't been a BTC hard fork in years and even the forks that happened were about relatively minor things, mainly block size.