Last week, at the EDCON 2019 conference held in Sydney, Australia, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum core developer Stanislaw V ysotsky, and Ethereum researcher Justin Drake answered questions about Ethereum in a Q&A event.

The birth of PoS has gone through years of research
Proof of Stake (PoS) first appeared publicly in 2011 in a post on the Bitcoin forum Bitcoin Talk. But no one was sure the concept would work. Vitalik Buterin started really digging into it in 2014 and came up with a solution, but it didn't work out.
Stanislaw Vysotsky said:"The first version of PoS proposed by Buterin is not technically safe. It has a liveness failure problem. Since then, we have conducted a lot of research and worked out a PoS that is actually possible, and what trade-offs we need to make."

Little progress was made in the ensuing year. In 2015, Buterin proposed a more feasible model, which is closer to the model that Ethereum will eventually adopt.
“In 2015, I wrote this large paper on scalable blockchain design that is pretty close to what we have implemented so far, but we still have a lot of details to figure out.”
Practical Ethereum applications continue to grow
2018 was a year of rapid development for dapps, but not so fast as to be surprising. This may change as the tools available to Ethereum developers evolve.
Stanislaw Vysotsky points out:"We're developing with more tools and on more platforms than ever before. I expect more things to come out in the next few months. For developers , the experience is becoming more and more interesting.”
Ryan noted that it was originally introduced to Ethereum as a privacy solution. Since then, the Ethereum community has needed some time to digest the potential applications.
“A few years ago, zk-Snarks were seen as a privacy-related technology. It took time for the community to digest it and find out that there are many other things you can do with it, especially scalability.”
Stanislaw Vysotsky agrees: "I think zk-Snarks are still underrated for scalability and overrated for privacy."
The Ethereum Foundation Won't Live Forever
The Ethereum Foundation has no income, only expenses. Things get a little better by selling t-shirts and event tickets.
Stanislaw Vysotsky said: "The Ethereum Foundation actually has many opportunities to provide consulting services. But as a non-profit organization, the foundation's current operations will continue as usual."