No real reason to even give a time frame. They should just say the POW will end when they have the next step of the software ready to handle it.
a few months ago they were saying PoW ends sometime in summer or fall, ten tey pushed it to winter/2017, and now it sounds like summer 2017?
but let's play that out, do you not think they would have a RIOT, the day they announced if at all this year even, that pow will end for ETH?
does it mean anything that the "big" companies have invested in ETH mining?
does that tell us maybe it WONT end? (for a while atleast)
genesis ,hashcoins, zeushash all building huge eth farms, they MUST anticipate atleast 12 more months of mining?
imo why would they invest now if less than 12 months remain? (and that was SUPPOSED to be a conservative number, casper was intended for 2016 if i remember right initially)
inside info i bet is that we have atleast 12 more months on eth mining, that's my guess
yeah never did get this...if he'd have done Ethereum with sha-256 everybody with a usb stick would have jumped in..more cheerleaders...more hype etc etc
but again why not keep the pow going for as long as possible....more invested in the coin working (miners) more hype etc
even if say the difficulty gets too large for current GPU's you could say..hey......sorry ....use the new gpu stuff coming out and extend it again...for another round of hype /pump
but imho ethereum would have been even bigger using asic and sha-256 .....I woulda jumped on that bandwagon just to watch my 'baby' hash again for fun from day 1
(can't sell my knc jupiter 550gh...it made me 53 btc.......a forlorn hope it will ever run again) so hey better odds
then me hooking up with Natalie Portman ..but not by much.....)
then again I know a couple guys who 'streaked' back to the family farm and dug the GPU rigs out of the attic because they could not let go either ( They are happily mining either with a dozen or more cards from say week one ...were just looking
for an excuse to fire up the toys again..so it paid off big time for them
anyway in 20/20 hindsight with what Ethereum has done....this would have been the better play...hell think of the large farms that would have dumped out of BTC
no we are talking war then
(I have no Ethereum...missed boat..just wool gathering on what if's ...likely wrong)