It's been vaporware forever, I'll believe it when I see it.

And I still wouldn't like it. Proof of Stake is even more directly aimed at making the rich richer, whereas Proof of Work only did it with a few extra steps. But at least they'd no longer be burning the planet.

Some of the most dedicated software engineers I’ve ever met have been working on it (transition to PoS) intensely for 2 years now and I heard from their own mouths (physically, in person) week before last just how excited they are it’s wrapping up.

None of this work has happened in the dark. The regular cross-team meetings, constant stream of commits on GitHub, etc. are in the open for all to see.

Next phase will be sharding and splitting out data availability from consensus strictly speaking, exciting times!

When do they expect PoS will be live at the latest? Before the fall or next year?

At best it will be another hard fork. The miners need to vote on the change to PoS, and why would they? It would render their mining equipment worthless.

It's the other way around. The miners can't do anything to prevent the switch since most major Ethereum users (aka Infrastructure providers) are clearly in favour and are already participating in the POS chain (which is currently running in parallel and without transactions).

When they update they miners are simply cut off.

Furthermore, Ethereum contains a self destruct mechanism that requires a hard fork. Unless miners can coordinate a competing POW fork (and convince rich people that the bad PR and profits for them are worth it) they won't be able to do anything.

Isn't ETC quite clear precedent for that?

It obviously wouldn't be as large and probably suffer from everyone on real ETH selling off their duplicated assets, but it'll surely be a thing, a last ditch effort to keep mining rigs profitable before everyone moves on to the next best coin?

Sure it could happen (and probably will in some form).

However unless it captures a siginficant fraction of ETH value it won't be worth much and in turn won't be attractive to miners.

Right now ETH makes up 95+ percent of all GPU miner revenue and there aren't a lot of (successful) new POW coins these days.

I think the (GPU mining) market simply collapsing has a high likelihood.

It's not unreasonable to think of POS as vaporware since it was first announced as coming in 2017.

However this time around they have working implementations in all relevant clients which are being stress tested and debugged since a few months.

So far there have been quite a few bugs but nothing fundamental.

I'd say it's not unrealistic to expect the switch happening this summer according to the unofficial time line. There are a few billion dollars staked already and those funds as are locked until it happens.

I fully agree with your other point.

The technology isn't the difficult part though. Will miners replace PoW with PoS? What will they do with all the GPUs and cheap access to electricity they've invested millions or billions in? The social aspects transition will be immensely more difficult than the technological aspects.

But I do hope that, somehow, all those miners will just... accept the move to PoS and turn off their mining farms. I just don't see it as extremely likely.

As I wrote in another comment, the miners are not really in control once there is an alternative solution.

They can continue using POW (if they manage to coordinate an independent self-destruct mechanism override) however they cannot force the actual users (private individuals and infrastructure providers) to do so.

If miners don't manage to capture a significant fraction of ETH value in their hypothetical ETHPOW chain it won't be worth their effort. Buying a GPU for mining now caries a significant business risk and prices are already declining.

PS: There are billions of dollars already staked in the (currently empty) POS chain.

Well, we'll see I guess. I certainly hope you're right. But PoS has been "right around the corner" for the last half decade at least, so I'll believe it when I see it.

I do wonder what miners would do with all their hardware and infrastructure tho. Presumably they'll all just move to another cryptocurrency and nothing really changed, etherium got a little cleaner while bitcoin or whatever got a little dirtier.

A sensible approach :)

Let's hope that POW turns out to be a very brief (in the great scheme of things) peak of human creativity / stupidity.