Bitcoin educator, author, and programmer Jimmy Song is one of these, and he tells that much of the discussion surrounding Ethereum’s transition misses one very important fact. Naturally, people sitting more within the Bitcoin camp don’t agree that PoS is superior to PoW. “In proof-of-work, big mining companies are buying the hardware directly from the manufacturer in bulk and get way better prices than a normal user would There is the argument that in PoS only ‘the rich get richer,’ but I would argue that this is even more so in PoW, as mining companies can leverage their economy of scale way better than any home miner could,” he added. This, in his view, contrasts favorably with what you generally find with PoW cryptoassets such as Bitcoin.
Responding to perceptions that a small, super-rich elite could effectively monopolize the network, van der Wijden also suggests that running 10 validators is only slightly more efficient than running one as most costs are the capital requirements. At the time of writing, ETH 32 is worth almost USD 109,000. The capital requirement of becoming a staker is ETH 32, which is relatively low (it was ~USD 5,000 at the start of the beacon chain) and there are no huge economies of scale here,” he told. “We made sure that normal users with their consumer-grade hardware can both follow the chain as well as propose blocks. Indeed, for him, Ethereum’s implementation of PoS “excels” with regards to the aforementioned categories of decentralization, security, and fairness. Of course, this isn’t a view shared by the developers and coders working on Ethereum’s particular version of PoS, which according to van der Wijden can’t simply be judged in terms of previous instances of the consensus mechanism. One particular contention is that PoS isn’t really decentralized, in that it simply allows the already-rich to buy up large stakes and effectively control the network, with consolidation resulting.
Indeed, in the months (not to mention years) preceding the merge, there have been plenty of disputes related to proof-of-stake. The biggest ones are probably around decentralization, security, and fairness,” said Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden. “I think there are a lot of misconceptions around the merge, not only from Bitcoiners.
The decentralization, security, and fairness debate However, as exciting as it will be for the Ethereum and wider crypto communities, it won’t be without its controversies and misconceptions, while there’s also a good chance that it could reignite the ongoing rivalry between Bitcoin (BTC)/proof-of-work (PoW) and Ethereum/PoS maximalists.Ĭ has asked Ethereum developers and community members, as well as industry players outside of the Ethereum community what to expect, and what not to expect, from the transition. This merge - which will see Ethereum’s original execution/settlement layer integrate with the beacon chain’s new consensus layer - is likely to be one of the biggest events in the crypto sector in 2022. Now that Kiln has gone live, it should be more or less only a matter of time before Ethereum will complete its ‘ merge’ with the PoS beacon chain, which is due in Q2 2022. Ethereum (ETH) has launched Kiln, the final testnet its development community will use prior to the blockchain network's long-awaited transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.