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0 pointsCarlBeek5y ago0 comments

Here are a few of the reasons that come to mind as to why this transition has been taking us so long:

* The design of the Beacon Chain is far more optimised than our initial designs for a PoS system

* There are far more crypto-economic edge cases in a PoS system when compared to PoW

* Software development is hard and time estimates are even harder

* The use of a hybrid fork choice to balance safety and liveness trade-offs

* There is a crazy amount of value being handles on Ethereum so it is necessary to be conservative with our changes (move fast and break things is not an option)

* There are 4 concurrent implementations being developed all of which need to be inter-compatible, and production ready

* As Ethereum governance is decentralised we need a shelling point for exactly what Ethereum PoS looks like, this takes time

* We have worked hard to create, encourage, and embrace standards with other chains so that the cryptocurrency community of tomorrow is more inter-compatible (eg. IETF BLS standard or libp2p networking)

* We have spent time designing around quantum-computing resistant backups for the majority of the cryptography (eg. validators all have a Lamport backup key though most don't realise it)

* New cryptography has been developed and previously abandoned schemes revitalised (eg. Verifiable Delay Functions or the Legendre PRF)

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defaultname5y ago

And by far the most significant hindrance to moving away from proof of work is that there a number of significant players who have a large economic interest in PoW. Ethereum was promising this move many years ago, but it always was an extraordinarily low priority.

There are a lot of people with perverse biases. Many of the comments enthusiastically defending Bitcoin are people who are sitting on BTC and have watched it get pummelled due to its ludicrous enormous-energy-for-something-that-does-nothing-for-humanity reality (seriously -- if I see one more chart comparing the entirety of the financial industry with Bitcoin. The former powers the entire world. The latter powers some speculators, criminals, and a minuscule number of legitimate transactions).

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rfd4sgmk8u5y ago

* Its a technically flawed solution that now has so much hype, abandoning the idea would lead to further FUD, tarnishing the project's future direction. So we must go through the motions to appease the energy FUD warriors.

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