Of course you can argue this upcoming upgrade will never happen. But you could argue the same about the merge upgrade, and this one did happen in the end.
lambdadmitry is aware of that, they wrote "that is, staking right now is a one way street with a promise to be able to withdraw some time in the future".
>Of course you can argue this upcoming upgrade will never happen. But you could argue the same about the merge upgrade, and this one did happen in the end.
They weren't saying that it definitely won't happen, their main point was "[the return] is laughably low for something that risky". Yes, you might be able to withdraw in the future, but it's not guaranteed and right now you can't, so there should be more attention paid to the risk as it stands.
What's more, it's expected to change, changing the rules of a system relying on incentives to stay sound. In that sense it's not even releasing an alpha version, it's releasing a different product and promising to launch the announced one some time later.
1/ cryptocurrencies are here to stay, like it or not
2/ The environmental harm done by PoW is a much greater risk to oneself than losing some money on staking.
Then staking becomes a « vote with your wallet » situation to nudge the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem towards non-polluting algorithms.
If you prove switching to PoS can be done at Ethereum’s scale, the case to ban PoW altogether becomes much stronger.
What you're saying is effectively "staking is a donation to Ethereum future", which I don't mind as long as it is explicit. In Ethereum's communications, it's anything but.
If software development has taught me anything, it's to never depend on the anticipated future kindness of software projects I don't control.