The Compromises and Benefits of Ethereum Switching to a Proof-of-Stake Network

cryptonews.com:

Max Shannon, Digital Asset Analyst at major European digital asset investment firm CoinShares.

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Ethereum has an Evolving but Structured Roadmap of Protocol Changes.

Before its launch in 2015, Ethereum developers already had a stated ambition to replace its Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism with an alternative one: Proof-of-Stake (PoS). While it was deemed too technically risky to start the network with anything other than PoW, the eventual migration to PoS has been a major development goal of Ethereum developers and a highly anticipated milestone on their roadmap.

The migration to PoS is considered to be an extremely important milestone because developers regard it as a key prerequisite for several subsequent development goals, and because the Ethereum community believes the reduction in energy usage is worth the trade-offs in protocol attributes it generates.

Though subject to some changes, the development roadmap itself predates the launch of Ethereum and has existed since the network was only in its testnet phase. Many of the changes described in the evolving roadmap have already been implemented, but the migration to PoS, one of the most challenging and involved modifications, has yet to be completed and is now delayed.

The reasons for the delays are many and complex, but they more or less reduce to PoS proving much more technically challenging to safely implement than developers first thought. Many prototypes have been proposed and evaluated, but problems have kept emerging, necessitating ongoing multi-year bouts of bug fixes and redesigns. 

We can even observe the serial delays of the migration, often referred to as the Merge, from blockchain data. Confident that the PoS implementation is ever near at