You should check this article out as I wrote it to clear up exactly what PoW is doing under the hood, how it works from ground up, and why it's built that way.
The 'processing' of transactions isn't what all of the energy in PoW is being used for, the excess energy is the external or exogenous incentive mechanism it uses to ensure people can't spin up infinite nodes at zero cost and overtake > 51% of the network. PoS instead has users put up 32e at stake where the capital can be slashed if there is misbehavior.
PoW miners can continue to attack the network and there really is no penalty outside the waste of resources and eventually you can get booted from the network, where as PoS gets 1 shot at an attack before the stake is slashed/deleted and node removed from the network.
You should check this article out as I wrote it to clear up exactly what PoW is doing under the hood, how it works from ground up, and why it's built that way.
How PoW works and why
The 'processing' of transactions isn't what all of the energy in PoW is being used for, the excess energy is the external or exogenous incentive mechanism it uses to ensure people can't spin up infinite nodes at zero cost and overtake > 51% of the network. PoS instead has users put up 32e at stake where the capital can be slashed if there is misbehavior.
PoW miners can continue to attack the network and there really is no penalty outside the waste of resources and eventually you can get booted from the network, where as PoS gets 1 shot at an attack before the stake is slashed/deleted and node removed from the network.