Vitalik Buterin’s Take on Bitcoin’s Launch and the Transition to PoS

In one interview Recently, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared his views on Bitcoin and how he would launch BTC if he were his father.

Surprisingly, Buterin said that while Proof-of-Stake (PoS) has its advantages, particularly in terms of environmental impact, he led Satoshi Nakamoto’s decision to use Proof-of-Work (PoW) at the time as a the right thing too.

But why is Buterin saying that, given the efforts Ethereum is making to switch from a PoW to a PoS chain?

The Ethereum 2.0 upgrade poses major technical challenges

One of the significant developments in the crypto ecosystem is the move from Ethereum to the PoS blockchain. Together with other upgrades, ETH 2.0 will bring more scalability, sustainability and more security.

The path to ETH 2.0 is divided into three main phases. Beacon Chain, which provides staking functions and forms the basis for the rest of the development. This phase went live a year ago in December 2020.

Then there is Merge, which refers to the merging of the Beacon Chain with the existing ETH 1.0 chain. The expected release time for this is Q1 / Q2 2022. However, the discussion about postponing the difficulty bomb to May 2022 suggests that this phase may not go as planned.

The difficulty bomb is a process that makes PoW mining increasingly difficult until Ethereum can no longer be mined. Indeed, to let the miners run out.

Finally, there are shard chains that distribute the network payload across 64 new chains to improve scalability and capacity. It is estimated that this will be ready “around 2022”.

This way, it’s a lot more complicated than building a new blockchain from scratch. The parallel operation of two chains and their subsequent merging presents technical challenges that would not exist if started with PoS.

Why proof of work?

Instead of lamenting PoW as a concept, Buterin said it had its own role to play, especially in the early days when cryptocurrencies were starting to take off.

What to do if he were the father of Bitcoin, Buterin describes a similar schedule to Ethereum now.

“I used PoW probably for the first five years and proof of proportion after that.”

He added that PoW is a democratic way of distributing tokens. While ASIC mining may have destroyed this as well-equipped companies caught on, Buterin pointed out that primarily anyone could mine Bitcoin with a CPU. And then with the GPU.

“The fact that Bitcoin operates PoW at all is very important and very good.”

However, as cryptocurrencies are gaining acceptance, PoS makes more sense in the long term.

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Annie

According to Kryptoslate

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