Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tried to dispel community doubts about the long-term future platform by shedding light on some details of the upcoming transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and the final transition to Ethereum 2.0.

This question was one of the most discussed at the Devcon5 conference in Osaka, Japan these days, but there were no clear answers for a long time. Moreover, after Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin admitted that they knew about the problems with network scaling from the very beginning, they even began to receive accusations of intentionally selling a fraudulent scheme.

Among the questions that concern the community, we can single out the immediate timing of the transition to Ethereum 2.0, as well as what the current network will be in after that, and Buterin tried to answer them in his last post on ethresear.ch .

“Technically, the eth1 network will continue to exist, but it will not be of value. Over time, when the ice age of complexity sets in, it will die out, ” he wrote.

The transition to Ethereum 2.0, according to him, will take six hours. Actual implementation may take up to two years. During this time, the Ethereum Foundation will work on the implementation of phase 0-2. It starts with the introduction of the PoS algorithm, the ETH1 network at the same time will work as before, but the withdrawal of funds at this stage will be impossible.

For most users, the process will be in the background, the difference will be that witness data will be added with each new transaction, which will allow them to be processed already on the ETH2 network.

“You will go to sleep, and when you wake up, the transition will be completed,” Buterin says.

Recall that in August, Ethereum developers approved the final details of the upcoming Istanbul hard fork. It is assumed that it will be activated in two stages. The first one will include six major upgrades and is expected to be activated in November.

The second phase should be implemented in the first quarter of 2020. It will include changes that still require refinement and testing, including the new ProgPoW mining algorithm.

At the same time, representatives of some projects fear that hard fork will lead to disruptions in the work of many decentralized applications (dApps).

In late September, Istanbul was activated in the Ropsten test network, however, it happened earlier than planned and led to the division of the network into two separate circuits.

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