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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

The Ethereum PoS chain is already active today and giving "staking" rewards. PoW is still active too but both chains are mining ETH at the moment and the plan is to switch to PoS only.

As the PoS did actually launch and is actually working, I'm not sure it's going to be "never".

They may be late like so many software projects, but they seem to be serious about the switch to proof of stake.

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For those that don't know, staking is a dedicated computer + 32 ETH in escrow, then you get your ETH back + 1/2 ETH payment at the end of the month but fewer if you were offline including possibly losing some of your escrowed ETH.

What is the computer doing during that time?

Validating or creating blocks, which to be clear is _significantly_ less work than mining.

Voting on block proposals as part of a randomly assigned committee.

So it's not possible to stake without 32 ETH to stake? That's a sizeable investment.

staking pools are a thing

So at what point do they throw the switch that invalidates millions of dollars of investment in mining Etherum? Or is it all transferrable? And who is the "they" that throws the switch?

I only see your comment now, sorry for the late reply.

Well as I understand I it was clear from day one that Ethereum would switch "one day" to PoS so miners knew, from the start, what they were in for.

> ... that invalidates millions of dollars of investment in mining Etherum...

Well the GPUs will not be able to mine ETH anymore but the ETH already mined aren't lost: the PoW chain is going to merged inside the PoS one.

I take it this all decided by the "Ethereum foundation"?

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