Author | Vitalik Buterin
Author | Vitalik Buterin
We often talk about the fact that PoS consensus consumes much less resources than PoW, and we also talk about some key benefits of PoS, such as economic finality, but let's not forget some secondary benefits of switching to PoS. In theory, most of these benefits should be realized immediately after the merger.
Block generation time distribution: Under the PoW consensus mechanism, the block distribution is based on Poisson distribution (Poisson distribution), so the block generation time will vary greatly. The average block generation time is 13 seconds, but sometimes it exceeds 30 seconds or even 60 seconds . After you send a transaction, you wait an average of 13 seconds for the next block to appear. The PoS mechanism has a fixed block time, a block is generated every 12 seconds, and the average waiting time for sending a transaction is 6 seconds. The only exception is when the proposer is offline, which is rare. After EIP-1559 is implemented on the mainnet, this will greatly improve the Ethereum user experience.
Faster block confirmation before finalization: In terms of PoS finality, a block cannot be rolled back after being confirmed for about two epochs. But before that, the speed of security improvement is much faster than PoW, because under the LMD GHOST fork selection rule, hundreds of proofs will be generated at the same time, which will form a model that is better than PoW (each block confirms Both require the consensus of the whole network) faster convergence speed. After 12 seconds, a block can be verified by hundreds of provers, making rollbacks very difficult.
Better light client protocols: PoW Ethereum has light clients, but they are far less efficient than they can be, and still require considerable time and resources to start and maintain. After absorbing the experience of PoW, the design of the PoS light client protocol is more sophisticated, and it only needs to download a few kb of data per day to keep in sync. This makes the browser built-in light client and mobile PoS light client wallet more feasible, reducing dependence on centralized service providers.
Can discover network problems faster: In a PoW network, if half of the nodes are offline, or cannot function properly due to vulnerabilities and hacker attacks, other nodes in the network will take a certain amount of time to find out, because there is not enough information at the beginning to identify what is happening events are distinguished from random events. In contrast, in a PoS network, if the node participation rate of a single slot drops from 99% to a lower level, it is very easy to detect, and you will immediately know that there is a problem with the network.
There are many more subtle benefits as well. The Ethereum network protocol stopped supporting the PoW chain before the merger, and the time to switch to the PoS chain gave us a natural opportunity to coordinate and reset the amount of data that the client needs to download. Existing data structures in the beacon chain (specifically the list of historical block roots and state roots) make it easier to access the history inside the EVM (this is the same benefit that EIP-2935 is trying to achieve). The SSZ structure makes any type of historical proof much easier to implement; moreover, a more complete conversion from RLP to SSZ for the entire protocol could greatly simplify Merkle proof generation.
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