Hasn't that date been continuously pushed back? Like the parent you replied to, I'll believe when I see it. And regardless, the mining infrastructure spun up because of the gold rush on Ethereum isn't going away at thia point. Those miners will just move to different chains.
And while proof of stake does partially minimize some of the environmental concerns, it introduces other problems that aren't great (like all of the power being systematically consolidated into the hands of early adopters and the wealthy).
It's been pushed a few times. Like any complex technical upgrade with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets on the line, it has to be taken very carefully and has to be tested very thoroughly against numerous vectors.
But there are live testnets of the Merge already, if you feel like testing it out: https://kintsugi.themerge.dev/ Please submit any bugs you find.
> And while proof of stake does partially minimize some of the environmental concerns, it introduces other problems that aren't great (like all of the power being systematically consolidated into the hands of early adopters and the wealthy)
Not here to get into PoW vs PoS debate. But its worth noting that Ethereum has hundreds of billions of dollars worth of non-native assets sitting on-chain. Many of these are protocols that didn't even exist 2 years ago. Anyone can create a whole new token on Ethereum that backs a new application and be their own early adopter.
For a more philosophical deep dive on PoW vs PoS, see Vitalik's writing on this: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
> The nft would be authorization, which sounds a lot like digital rights management to me
The NFT can be used as a token to access a particular service. But by no means is it anything like DRM.
An NFT is recorded in a smart contract. The record of an NFT's purchase and transfer history is immutable and on-chain. It's not revokable by a record company if they sold it under some particular terms to begin with.
At this point, however, it's far more likely that a music NFT has been produced and sold by the artist themselves, rather than a record label (3LAU https://nft.3lau.com/#/auction), Euler Beats (https://eulerbeats.com/genesis/21575894274), RAC (https://rac.fm/nft) as some examples. That's part of the beauty of this system, though, in my mind. An artist can have a direct relationship with their fans and keep nearly 100% of the revenue. They may even focus on obtaining 1000 high dollar mega-fans rather than hoping for a billion plays on Spotify, for example. And that's going to be perfectly ok as a business model in Web3.
One difference with NFTs is you retain the right to resale and transfer at all times. Which is totally different than DRM.
As for Proof of Stake, it's already live: https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/beacon-chain/ It was shipped in December of 2020.
The remaining component is the Merge, which merges the Proof-of-Work chain with the Proof-of-Stake chain: https://ethmerge.com/ . That is coming this summer. The Ethereum community is almost 100% behind the merge, so it's highly unlikely that ETH forks over it, and even if one occurred, the forked chain would not succeed.