As an ETH user and holder (and former miner), I want Ethereum 2.0. Describing it as a fork is ridiculous. Proof of stake is the future and miners have known that for years. Proof of work is a dead end that ends with a Dyson sphere harvesting all power from the sun to process a few transactions.
If miners want to make another Ethereum Classic dead chain let them do so. The innovation, the users, and all the developers will be on Ethereum 2.0.
The fork that left ETC as the original chain was a rollback of the chain that destroyed the concept of its immutability for the purpose of fixing a massive financial mistake.
There were no other chains left as a result of such a fork. It is a fork, and ETC is the original chain. Those are facts.
The protocol ensures that there is on average a block produced every 10 minutes.
As hash rates increase, and blocks are found slightly faster, the difficulty is adjusted upwards to ensure that the 1 block per 10 minutes is maintained.
We've seen difficulty drop in the past, it doesn't necessarily rise forever. It only makes sense to increase when it's still profitable to mine at the current difficulty.
If the difficulty rises to a certain level and the price falls, and it becomes unprofitable to mine for some miners, they switch off their rigs and the difficulty adjusts downwards after a period of time to compensate.
Over the years we have seen the price rise and hash optimizations made, which have both driven the difficulty upwards.
It's not strictly true in the sense that if the price were to fall over long enough periods of time, you would expect the hash rate to eventually fall, too.
But that's not plausible in the scenario where the world's financial system eventually runs on a proof of work cryptocurrency.
Since all miners compete over the same finite profits, each miner individually has an incentive to increase their hash power and therefore power consumption.
Even if the price was on average constant, the game theory would predict a competition over finding the cheapest way to burn the maximum amount of power.
Empirically, there were some transient drops in hash rate for both bitcoin and ethereum, on top of a constant massive run up.
The miners, as I've predicted here before, disagree, because this fork obliterates their entire business model. Shocking.