Vitalik: Advantages of Ethereum's PoS You Might Not Know
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Vitalik: Advantages of Ethereum's PoS You Might Not Know
In addition to critical improvements such as energy savings, Ethereum's PoS also offers many smaller benefits.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Vitalik Buterin
Translation: ETH Chinese
We often discuss how PoS consensus consumes far fewer resources than PoW, as well as some key benefits of PoS such as economic finality. However, we should not overlook the secondary benefits that come with transitioning to PoS. Theoretically, most of these benefits could be realized immediately after the Merge.
Block time distribution: Under PoW consensus, block distribution follows a Poisson distribution, leading to high variability in block times. While the average block time is 13 seconds, it can sometimes exceed 30 or even 60 seconds. After sending a transaction, you typically wait an average of 13 seconds for the next block. In contrast, PoS has fixed block intervals—generating a block every 12 seconds—reducing the average waiting time after sending a transaction to just 6 seconds. The only exception occurs when proposers go offline, which is rare. Once EIP-1559 is implemented on the mainnet, this will greatly improve Ethereum's user experience.
Faster block confirmation before finalization: Regarding finality in PoS, blocks become irrevocable approximately two epochs after confirmation. But even before finalization, security accumulates much faster than in PoW because under the LMD GHOST fork choice rule, hundreds of attestations are generated simultaneously, enabling convergence far quicker than PoW’s model (where each block confirmation requires global network consensus). Just 12 seconds after a block is proposed, it can receive attestations from hundreds of validators, making reorganization extremely difficult.
Better light client protocols: Light clients exist on PoW Ethereum, but they are significantly less efficient than what is possible, and still require considerable time and resources to initialize and maintain. Learning from PoW experiences, PoS light client protocols are better designed—requiring as little as a few kilobytes of data downloaded per day to stay synchronized. This makes browser-integrated light clients and mobile PoS light wallet applications more feasible, reducing reliance on centralized service providers.
Faster detection of network issues: In a PoW network, if half the nodes go offline or malfunction due to bugs or cyberattacks, other nodes may take significant time to detect the issue, since initially there isn't enough information to distinguish real problems from random fluctuations. By contrast, in a PoS network, a drop in validator participation within a single slot—from 99% down to lower levels—is immediately noticeable, allowing instant awareness that something is wrong with the network.
There are many additional subtle advantages. The moment when the Ethereum network protocol ceases support for the pre-Merge PoW chain and transitions fully to the PoS chain provides us with a natural coordination opportunity—to reset the amount of data clients need to download. Existing data structures in the beacon chain (notably lists of historical block roots and state roots) make accessing historical records from within the EVM much easier (offering similar benefits to those targeted by EIP-2935). The SSZ format makes any kind of historical proof easier to implement; furthermore, a more complete transition across the entire protocol from RLP to SSZ could greatly simplify Merkle proof generation.
The Merge isn’t just about transitioning to PoS—it brings a whole suite of benefits!
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