Vitalik Buterin On Centralization And What’s Next For Ethereum After Merge
Vitalik Buterin On Centralization And What’s Next For Ethereum After Merge.
The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin sat down with Bankless to talk more about what is in store for the future of Ethereum after transitioning from PoW to PoS. And he also addressed the worry of the community that the new PoS system is too centralized right now.
Vitalik Buterin On Worry About Centralization
When asked what he thought about centralization of stake where Coinbase, Kraken have large staking pools and the worry they are going to control all or the majority of the Ethereum stake. Buterin said that although it is a concern, he gave an explanation in the case of Lido, it is not as centralized as people think.
“Lido does have some pretty decent decentralization internally. Obviously even taking Lido out, then Coinbase plus Kraken plus some bunch of others do add up to quite a bit and it is a concern. Like I think in the short term, the good news is that, like these are good people and they are people who love Etherem and they do want Ethereum to prosper.”
Related: Vitalik Buterin Hopes Dogecoin Could Follow His Move to Proof of Stake (PoS)
He also believed that, other large staking pools are known companies and it is hard to see them doing something terrible in the Ethereum PoS system.
“So I think the risk they are going to do something terrible in the short term is pretty low. Brian has even been willing to say that he would rather shut down the Coinbase staking service than turn it into an engine of censorship right.”
Buterin was also asked if the Ethereum PoS system is more decentralized than the the PoW Ethereum. He answered that PoS is more centralized than before.
“I would say absolutely. I would say that for a couple of reasons. I mean one is that once you take in into account all of the solo stakers and Lido’s internal decentralization, I think it’s just a true as a matter of fact, post merge Ethereum is better on any reasonable decentralization metric than proof-of-work Ethereum or even proof-of-work Bitcoin.”
“The second thing I would say is that proof-of-stake has much better recovery from 51% attacks. Because if a 51% attack happens then you know you can so sure recover from it, you can partially automate recovering from it, you can do a lot of, there is a lot of recovery options that exists that just don’t exist at all in proof-of-work.”
He ended the questions with, “Why would you even make a system that relies on that when you can make a system where if an attack happens you can just delete the bad guys at stake and keep going”.
What’s Next? 2 Priorities For Ethereum After The Merge
Buterin also answered the question about what can the community expect next after the huge Merge event for Ethereum. And there are 2 big priorities right now for Ethereum which he explained what they are right now.
“I think there are two big priorities. One of the priorities is to get scaling figured out. And I mean that at all layers of the ecosystem, like getting the Ethereum protocol fully roll-up ready, which includes things like prototank sharding, getting roll-ups themselves to be fully ready for users, getting applications on top of them, getting good bridge infrastructure between them, getting all the wallets to support them. Not just helping the transition to a fully roll-up-centric Ethereum complete.”
“Then, the other one is a transition from Ethereum being in rapid developing fire fighting mode to Ethereum being in stability mode. I think it’s a transition that has to happen and I do think that to some extent it’s an inevitable transition because as the ecosystem grows, the cost of changing things increases, and then there starts being all these regulatory concerns and lots of existing stakeholders.”
After completing the Merge, Buterin said that developers do not need to rush through big protocol changes but still there is a narrow window of time to complete certain projects for the ETH blockchain.
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