What are the odds they pull it off this time? Already delayed once.
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We will see. It’s hard to move to sharding once your original architecture was based on a monolithic blockchain. Not only because there are miners, and so on. But because Ethereum is based on smart contracts and balances, so making each smart contract live on a shard will result in some being very valuable targets to try and attack the consensus. If the consensus is about something really valuable, it’s really got to have good security.
Here is how complicated it is, according to the Ethereum community:
In their own words:
Currently, in all blockchain protocols each node stores the entire state (account balances, contract code and storage, etc.) and processes all transactions. This provides a large amount of security, but greatly limits scalability: a blockchain cannot process more transactions than a single node can. In large part because of this, Bitcoin is limited to ~3–7 transactions per second, Ethereum to 7–15, etc.
However, this poses a question: are there ways to create a new mechanism, where only a small subset of nodes verifies each transaction? As long as there are sufficiently many nodes verifying each transaction that the system is still highly secure, but a sufficiently small percentage of the total validator set so that the system can process many transactions in parallel, could we not split up transaction processing between smaller groups of nodes to greatly increase a blockchain’s total throughput?
And here is from https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-introduction-R&D-compendium
Ethereum 1.0 can only process 7-15 transactions per second, the goal of sharding is to partition all network computational resources into shards, so that a node (a single computer as a peer connected to the network) doesn’t have to process (download, compute, store, read) every transaction in the history of the blockchain, in order to make a new transaction (write and upload) or otherwise participate in securing and using Ethereum; rather a node can just participate in a single shard, or more if it so chooses. Multiple shards are handled separately by different subsets of securing participants, aka securitors (which include notaries, proposers, miners and validators)[1]. The primary goal is a massive scalability improvement, potentially exponential in phase 6 of the roadmap, although Vitalik questioned whether exponential sharding will even be tenable in an ethresear.ch thread.
I asked a question about what the shards will have, in their reddit AMA, but didn’t get an answer:
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I have already heard something like this so many times that I do not have the slightest confidence in such statements, I would not be surprised if we read such a post again in a couple of years
Another miscalculation of the deadline from the Ethereum team. That’s sad. With such problems, “Berlin” will not be implemented in the promised time. This is bad and a blow to Ethereum’s reputation.
Just saw this update. Still waiting.
I would say that, compared to Ethereum, Intercoin misses its deadlines by a lot less 
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No words!
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wow this is crazy! I wonder what 2030 will look like 
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They better hurry up either way as there’s a lot of innovation going on out there!
Everyone seems to think i’m crazy for suggesting Ethereums position may not solidified. For most that’s been in crypto at least a year or so the idea of Ethereum being toppled seems impossible, but on stages of adoption we’re probably moving into the early adopters stage which means an insane growth in users coming and the word “Ethereum” will mean nothing to them. Cheapest, easiest and fastest is all they’ll care about.
We are seeing it already with other chains gaining popularity in the NFT space. Why pay huge Gas fees when you’ll have cheaper options and intercoin with zero gas 
I found it quite interesting Vitalik mentioned another ecosystem in his “end game” vision blog a few weeks ago.
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ETH is a popularity contest currently, things change. It will be interesting to see how fast things change! 
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Vitalik saying all the right things, but THREE years ago:
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When I made this post I didn’t know what ETH 2.0 is. Now I realized it’s just a marketing word; ETH 2.0 is a series of upgrades that their team is working on. Many things were done since this post, but I think the biggest one we are waiting for is proof of stake; beacon chain is already up and running and people are staking ETH; now we are just waiting for them to merge beacon chain with the main chain which is said to happen this summer
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FWIW despite their delays I am not bearish on ETH whatsoever, Optimism/Arbitrum is already pretty good to use and combined with POS I think it will be a good enough solution.
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