[DennisP]

It's pretty much guaranteed at this point. The staking network has been running since Dec. 1, with over 3% of all ETH staked so far. The initial migration is simple to implement and a high priority for the devs. Community support is very high, and once everybody switches to the new fork the miners have no influence.

The miners could keep running the old PoW chain but it's unlikely to have significant value. Exchanges will support the PoS chain and some are already offering staking services. Tokens collateralized by off-chain assets will use the PoS chain. Etc.

With the PoW chain having little value, miners will be deeply unprofitable and most of them will have to quit. Moving to other chains isn't much of an option because other GPU chains have little aggregate value.

[sendbitcoins]

Is there a limit to the number of staker-spots available? I'm wondering about inflation if too many people join the party.

[DennisP]

The more people join, the lower the rate of return[1]. The max inflation is about 1.71% annually, if 100M ETH stakes. Total supply right now is only 115M.

Net issuance will be lower than that because some transaction fees will get burned. It's possible that the supply will actually decrease.

There's no limit to the amount of stake other than the ETH supply, but they're talking about setting a limit of 32M ETH, just because it'd be more efficient and they don't really expect it to get that high anyway. Under that plan the validators get automatically rotated if >32M stakes.

[1] https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-roadmap/ethereum-2.0/eth-2.0...