Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tried to dispel community doubts about the long-term future of the 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 issue was one of the most discussed points at the Devcon5 conference in Osaka, Japan in October, because there were no clear answers for a long time.

Among the questions that concern the community, I picked out the following:

1) the timing of the transition to Ethereum 2.0;

2) what will happen to the current network after the transition.

Vitalik Buterin tried to answer these questions in his post on ethresear.ch.

“The eth1 chain technically continues,but it is valueless; eventually it will die off when the difficulty ice age hits,” 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 will start with the introduction of the PoS algorithm, while the ETH1 network will work as before, but the withdrawal of funds at this stage will be impossible.

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

“You go to sleep, and when you wake up the transition has happened,” Buterin says.

The changes and disruptions that you experience will actually be quite limited. Existing applications will keep running with no change. All account balances, contract code and contract storage (this includes ERC20 balances, active CDPs, etc etc) will carry over.

From a user’s point of view, Ethereum would “feel” the same pre- and post-transition (except that post-transition it would feel smoother due to PoS and EIP 1559). Very different code paths would be used to package and broadcast the transaction, but the functionality provided would be the same.

Vitalik Buterin also gave an example of interaction with the updated Ethereum network of the user of the Maker DAO service. You will be able to interact with and liquidate your CDP by sending transactions as before, except your client code would see that you are post-transition and add witness data to your transaction and send it to the eth2 network instead of the eth1 network.

So, there will be no hard-forks, no division of the community or any other troubles. Ethereum 1.0 will supposedly exist “inside” the Ethereum 2.0 ecosystem for some time. However, at the end of the transition process, the Ethereum 1.0 blockchain "will technically continue, but will be useless and will die when the difficult ice age sets in."