Hi @jmcgirk,
Great questions! Thank you so much for your input.
For your first question:
As opposed to conventional PoW blockchains, PoS-based blockchains are most likely going to have a lower carbon footprint, i.e., they are more environmentally friendly, since less computational power is needed to produce block hashes like in Bitcoin. Amongst existing PoS-blockchains, Polkadot was indeed found to be the most environmentally friendly (Report link: https://www.carbon-ratings.com/dl/pos-report-2022). However, I believe that this is mainly because Polkadot limits its validator set to 297 validators. But I’d like to point out that eventually the network will host 1000 validators like its Canary network, Kusama. I am interested to know what the carbon footprint for Kusama is; it would then provide a fairer comparison. Nonetheless, as pointed out in the summary above, Polkadot sets these limits to strike a balance between network performance and security; however, these restrictions have effectively limited the actual scalability of the network. It is all a big trade-off.
For your second question:
Definitely, Polkadot is a promising project but of course it comes with its limitations. While it adopts a phased-roll out deployment plan, we just have to wait and see how the network evolves and what other breakthroughs it can bring in the future.