So I'm talkign with some people, and it looks to me we will have many many new forks of ethereum soon (e.g. by 2018)
by forks, i mean active forks. (e.g. not Ethereum frontier)
The main issue propelling this is the fact that in Ethereum, mining difficulty and hashrate are not explicitly coupled. The Ethereum foundation did this back in Homestead as a measure to force PoS onto the network, as it was originally planned as a hardfork, and probably still is. There are some calculations (e.g.
http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/qu...ible/3800#3800) that basically ensure that a hardfork of Ethereum will happen, because 1hour blocks are simply not network sustainable.
So to me it looks like something serious is going to happen inside of Ethereum within the next 12 months.
ETH Classic will have to fork. Possibly their devs will fork it to remain on PoW forever (smart), or it will simply port over ETH's PoS. ETH will have to fork to PoS.
this is all assuming that PoS is ready by q2 2017. If it isnt, then its possible that we can see ETH fork twice into PoS, creating 3 active fork chains:
ETHc PoW difficulty fix
ETH
ETH PoW difficulty fix
ETH PoS
Summary:
ETHc will have to fork
ETH will have to fork
if they fork into
PoS, and it fails (as in, PoS is not secure), consider Ethereum completely dead. Because it will be unbelievably difficult to rescue PoW ETH or ETHc forks once PoS has been active.
it is possible that people will look to reboot Ethereum and start with a new genesis block, separate from ETHc (smart) that is PoW forever.