Vitalik Buterin says that Ethereum's PoW was 'quite centralized' and a 'temporary stage' until PoS
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Quick Take
- Vitalik Buterin responded to user comments Friday about wishing Ethereum had stayed with a PoW consensus system.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to comments about Ethereum's transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) from a proof-of-work (PoS) consensus system. Users had noted on social media platform X that numerous Ethereum community members wished the network stayed with PoW instead of PoS. That sentiment received pushback from the man who first proposed the creation of Ethereum in 2013 at the age of 19. "PoW was also quite centralized," Buterin responded. "It was just not talked about as much, because everyone knew it was only a temporary stage until PoS. And that doesn't even get into how we probably mostly avoided ASICs only because the upcoming PoS switch meant no incentive to build them." Buterin included a pie chart of Ethereum PoW mining pools, showing the now closed SparkPool comprising 33%, with Ethermine following second at 21% and F2Pool's 11% coming third. PoW secures a decentralized ledger by requiring miners to solve complex, energy-intensive mathematical problems to verify nodes and add blocks to the network, while a PoS system uses tokens staked to validator nodes to authenticate transactions. Ethereum transitioned to a PoS consensus system in September 2022 in a move known as The Merge, which dropped Ethereum's energy consumption by 99.5%, The Block previously reported. Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures. © 2023 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.
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