Beacon chain is live with over $5 billion in ETH deposited so far, and has been running flawlessly since its December 1 launch. There are minor tweaks coming this summer. A few months after that, if everything still looks good, they'll migrate the legacy chain to it and proof-of-work on Ethereum will end.

The migration is a decent amount of work but it's not the difficult research task that the beacon chain was. Someone did a proof-of-concept in about a day, though the exact plan has changed since then.

> they'll migrate the legacy chain to it and proof-of-work on Ethereum will end.

Likely closer to: they'll create a mirror on the new chain and a group of unknown size will keep ETH 1 fork alive.

Which is fine. Given the massive community support for ETH2, the legacy chain is likely to have even less impact than ETC.

What will happen once the security guarantees of ETH2 eclipse ETH1?

How would that be possible?

If no one wants to buy the old ETH, then it won't be profitable to mine, so no one will mine it. Without mining there is no security (as far as the old PoW chain is concerned.)

Kind of like how Ethereum Classic (ETC) is subject to 51% attacks every other week and requires multiple days' worth of confirmations after deposit to any exchange.

Meanwhile, the higher the price of the new ETH and the more of it gets staked, the stronger its security.

It's a continuous process that is already in progress and aimed at (mostly) completing in 2022. For what is worth, ETH PoS alternatives are also gaining a lot of ground in the mean time.

The beacon chain - the first step in the transition - has already launched: https://beaconcha.in/

Literally as we speak. It's in production, but the process of deprecating proof-of-work will still take a couple years.

Never.

They've been "moving to proof of stake" for something like three years.

The miners are making money off of them not moving to proof of stake. The miners stop making money when they move to proof of stake. The only people who can actually allow the chain to move to proof of stake are the miners.

Meanwhile, xtz and ada have been proof of stake since their inception, 3+ years already for both.

I mean I'm also disappointed by the slow pace of the transition, but they are clearly making progress towards it.

They've been _planning_ to move to PoS for ~3 years, with a much too optimistic timeline. In the meantime a lot of companies working towards that have collapsed or refocused on other efforts, delaying the whole transition. It will probably take another ~3 years (my personal estimate) until the transition is reasonably finished and core parts of the ecosystems have migrated, but at least it's moving into the right direction.

> They've been _planning_ to move to PoS for ~3 years, with a much too optimistic timeline.

PoS has always been on the roadmap even before their ICO. But yes, with a MUCH more optimistic timeline.

Yes, but back then nothing more than the first few ideas towards their PoS existed IIRC.

2-3 years ago is when the Casper FFG paper was published and subsequently the architecture of Ethereum 2.0 (and the concrete 3-phase roadmap towards it) were published.

There is nothing the miners can do to stop the migration, any more than they can stop you from making your own fork of Ethereum and convincing your friends to run it.

The miners can keep running the legacy version, and try to convince users and exchanges to stick with it. Given the massive community support for PoS, they're not likely to be very successful.

You’re confused.

They claim they are going to fork ETH to make a POS fork of it. Now the people claiming this are going to want you to believe that’s the “real” eth- but the miners may not agree. They have no incentive to do so.

And yes, they can absolutely keep running the real chain and let the chips fall where they may. Given that course of action benefits them, and the other benefits Vitalik and his whale friends...

That's...exactly what I just said.

It doesn't matter what the miners believe, if the exchanges, applications, and users have moved to the PoS chain. Which is very likely to happen, given the community support for PoS, the scaling coming on that side at around the same time, and the fact that exchanges are already letting users earn returns by staking ETH, while the exchanges take a percentage of profits.

I think you are projecting your belief about ETH v3.0 or whatever it is onto a lot of people who don't agree with you.

Vitalik et all have been talking about pos for years. Meanwhile a huge portion of the cryptocurrency space went there already (years ago) and left eth behind. POS isn't some new technology.

As a random user of ETH: I'm going to go to the PoS fork because of the (implied) fee difference. ~$50 for a wire is going to kill the chain (imho), and I don't see miners incentivized to handle that.

It's an interesting hope. I'm not sure that's going to fix anything.

Fees don't come from whether it's pow or pos, they come from volume and the need to prioritize transactions.

Peercoin introduced proof-of-stake in 2012, and Nano/XRB used it at its inception in 2015. So, yes, cryptocoins have had PoS in production for quite a while.