There's a site made to track the details of what needs to happen before the merge. https://wenmerge.com/ it still lacks specific date commitments. The focus is on "when it's ready" given that ~0.5 trillion dollars are in the system.

I believe the date it currently counts down had been planned as the merge date/deadline but has explicitly been postponed already.

ethmerge.com still says Q2 too, but a prediction market https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos sees only a 75% chance of it happening this year, and a 61% chance of it happening by the end of Q3.

Yup.

> The ultimate goal of the Ethereum Foundation for 2017 is to follow the vision of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and make a move from a proof of work to a proof of stake protocol

https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereums-2017-roadmap-flexib...

Yes and in 2017 there hadn't been a proof of stake network running in parallel for a year and a half, with 10% of all ETH deposited and locked in place until after proof of work is killed off. Nor had there been multiple public testnets for the merge process.

I'm just an outsider, but to OP's point, in 2017 they had none of what you just cited yet they were making the "within a year" claims, and continued to do so year after year. One can't help but draw a comparison to the boy who cried wolf.

Edit: This isn't me taking a position, just observing.

I'm also skeptical, but let's remember that the point of the fable is not "the boy's repeated claims lost credibility because the wolf never came", but rather "the people eventually learned to ignore the boy's claims and were caught by surprise when the wolf finally came" ツ

But if PoS comes after everyone stops caring about ETH (or PoS), it still fails. PoS isn't the hard part. Getting ETH successfully onto PoS is the hard part.

According to the people designing and building this stuff, PoS itself was a lot harder than merging it with the rest of the network.

For PoS there was all sorts of complicated game theory, a whole new protocol, and trying to figure out every possible way to attack it.

For the merge, it's basically just changing the fork choice rule of the existing network, so instead of going with the fork with the most work, it goes with the one being chosen by the PoS network.

They still haven’t solved the nothing at stake issue. I don’t see any progress being made regarding game theory.

Locked deposits and slashing solve nothing-at-stake.

I don't think it'll ever happen because the miners don't want it. They've invested millions into GPUs and they'll all become worthless once Eth switches to PoS.

Or they'll find another coin to mine.

$30 billion in ETH locked on the PoS network will be worthless if they don't switch.

Meanwhile, there's no technical way for the miners to keep the switch from happening.

>Meanwhile, there's no technical way for the miners to keep the switch from happening.

Right, because it’s never happened that miners disagree with a change and split into a different chain…

They can certainly do that, but that doesn't keep the merge from happening. It just means there might be a PoW chain on the side. It'll be up to the market to decide whether it's worth anything, and if it's not worth much, it won't support much mining activity.

So far, the miners don't appear to be organizing a chain split. And it would take some organizing; they'd need to defuse the difficulty bomb, get exchange support, try to get support from the people running tokens backed by custodied assets, etc. Perhaps most critically, they'd need to get a large portion of the user community to believe that PoW is better and worth sticking with. That's not happening either, and Ethereum users are very much looking forward to PoS.

Remind me how many existing splits there are?

One. In that case, unlike today, a large portion of the user community believed that the alternate approach was a better idea.

And the market did make a pretty definite decision on the two forks' relative worth. ETH today is worth $2800 and ETC is at $26.

More than one, but alright. The point is the mechanism exists to just fucking ignore PoS and if miners don’t think there is enough in it for them, it won’t happen.

Of course miners can keep their PoW chain going. That doesn't mean anyone else will care about it, or that they can stop the PoS chain from going live.

There have been lots of Ethereum forks, but ETC is the only case where the old chain stayed active. In every other case the old chain was abandoned. (Bitcoin on the other hand has multiple active chain splits.)