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Ethereum Switches to PoS In Order Be A Way Secure Than Bitcoin; Vitalik Buterin States

Ethereum has declared its big plan to switch to the PoS (Proof-of-Stake) consensus Algorithm. This shift brings a huge change in Ethereum’s security. By shifting PoS, Ethereum would be more costly than Bitcoin (BTC) to attack, founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin said.

During Ethereum developers conference, Devcon 5, Buterin has revealed the thought of planning to switch to PoS. Conference took place in Osaka from Oct 8 to 11. He particularly stated that switch to PoS makes it costly to attack ethereum, which makes it a safer network than Bitcoin.

What is PoS?, Differing Features From PoW

Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is a consensus algorithm which is used to maintain blockchain networks. PoS does not require miners to resolve the complex mathematical puzzles to make the transactions secure, as the PoS does. Instead of that, PoS implement economic incentives to maintain the security of the network. And this economic incentives theory is a far better and efficient manner to secure the network.

Buterin, in his speech, talked about the Bitcoin first and paid honour to its the false-named founder, Satoshi Nakamoto . Noting that he created the crypto economics to empower people to maintain the network.

System’s architecture ensured that attackers would require to spend a great deal of money to favourably compromise the blockchain. Buterin proclaimed this design has still a problem, further explained:

“What about attackers who have a really large, extra protocol incentive, or just want to watch the world burn? Could be a government. Or hackers that want to have some fun. The critique here says we’re assuming we have these participants motivated by economic incentives. What if there are people who just want to break the thing regardless?”

Ethereum’s Stake-based Protocol

With the use of Ethereum’s PoS, users would lock their ether in smart contracts to be enabled to validate new blocks without putting into a great deal of computing power and electricity, As the PoW does. So, if the user with locked coins behaves inconveniently, their Ethers (locked coins) would be trashed.

With more Ether stake, probabilities for the validation of block would be increased. Same as, if a miner has more computing power, the possibilities of mining a block would be increased.

As stated by Buterin, in PoS system, after validator creates a new block, there is a course of time, during which this block can be challenged for whether it has illegal data.

Attackers Would lose a Great Deal of ETH

If the challenge is proved with sufficient evidence, so the dishonest validator’s stake (locked coins) would be trashed and the challenger would be compensated. Buterin elaborated:

“The challenger can submit a transaction that points to [the block in question]. So I that calculation runs on the blockchain. The blockchain’s like, ‘wait the actual answer is 256 and this guy submitted 250 so this guy’s wrong.’ The original guy’s deposit is destroyed and part is given to the challenger.”

As stated by Buterin, a successful strike on the network would require plenty of malicious blocks to be validated. And for this purpose, a huge amount of ether stake would be required that could be trashed as soon as the challenge would be proved. This action makes attacks more expensive to implement. And this is the great success of PoS over PoW, said Buterin.