Buterin and Armstrong reflect on proof-of-stake shift as Eth | Crypto Retro
Buterin and Armstrong reflect on proof-of-stake shift as Ethereum Merge nears.
Two influential figures in the cryptocurrency space unpack their individual journeys to understanding the promise of proof-of-stake as The Merge approaches for Ethereum.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong believe that a gradual mind shift and important community contributions led to their backing of Ethereum’s upcoming move from a proof-of-work (PoW) to aproof-of-stake (PoS) consensus.
The two industry titans joined Coinbase protocol specialist Viktor Bunin on the Around the Block podcast for an enlightening discussion centered on The Merge, which is set to take place in mid-September 2022.
Buterin reflected on his history of considering proof-of-stake as a potential consensus mechanism for the Ethereum blockchain, which was initially met with skepticism due to a number of unsolved problems that made it seemingly unviable.
According to the Ethereum co-founder, one of the project's first blog posts in 2014 proposed an algorithm called slasher, which introduced the concept wherein a node would be penalized for voting for contradicting actions:
“This was my attempt at making inroads in solving what proof-of-stake critics call the "nothing-at-stake" problem. In proof-of-work if you want to build on top of two blocks you have to do double the work but in proof-of-stake you can just sign as many things as you want.”
Buterin believed that introducing an explicit penalty for signing contradictory actions would be a viable option. Research continued through 2014 to explore the security assumptions that Ethereum would have to rely on with PoS and if it could be more secure than PoW by making slashing penalties eat into staked deposits rather than staking rewards.
Buterin then reflected on a concept introduced at the end of that year called “weak subjectivity.” He explained that for a PoS network to benefit from the full security guarantee of the mechanism, a node has to be online at fairly regular intervals.
This could be every week, month, or year, with longer time periods becoming more inconvenient for stakers from a liquidity perspective.
