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August 15, 2021 10:34 am

Ethereum's Cryptocurrency Will 'Jettison' Mining for Speedier Proof-of-Stake

"Ethereum is making big changes," writes Bloomberg. "Perhaps the most important is the jettisoning of the 'miners' who track and validate transactions on the the world's most-used blockchain network.Miners are the heart of a system known as proof of work. It was pioneered by Bitcoin and adopted by Ethereum, and has come under increasing criticism for its environmental impact: Bitcoin miners now use as much electricity as some small nations. Along with being greener and faster, proponents say the switch, now planned to be phased in by early 2022, will illustrate another difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin: A willingness to change, and to see the network as a product of community as much as code... The idea behind proof of stake is that the blockchain can be secured more simply if you give a group of people carrot-and-stick incentives to collaborate in checking and crosschecking transactions... It's thought that switching to proof of stake would cuts Ethereum's energy use, estimated at 45,000 gigawatt hours by 99.9%. Like any other venture depending on cloud computing, its carbon footprint would then be only be that of its servers. It also is expected to increase the network speed. That's important for Ethereum, which has ambitions of becoming a platform for a vast range of financial and commercial transactions. Currently, Ethereum handles about 30 transactions per second. With sharding, Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum, thinks that could go to 100,000 per second. In a proof of stake system, it would be harder than in a proof of work system for a group to gain control of the process, but it would still be possible: The more Ether a person or group stakes, the better the chance of being chosen as a validator or attestor. Economic disincentives have been put in place to dissuade behavior that is bad for the network. The article also argues that Bitcoin's "growing dominance by huge, centralized mining farms" is "antithetical to a system that was designed to be decentralized."

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