Some less-appreciated benefits of Ethereum’s PoS

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Some less-appreciated benefits of Ethereum’s PoS

We talk a lot about the much lower resource expenditure that PoS requires compared to PoW, and about key benefits like economic finality, but it's also worth keeping in mind some secondary benefits that the switch to PoS will bring. Most of these benefits will theoretically become available immediately after the merge.

  • Block time distribution: in PoW, blocks are distributed according to a Poisson distribution, so there is a high variance between the time between two blocks. On average you get one block per 13 seconds, but there are occasional intervals where there's more than 30 or even more than 60 seconds between two blocks. When you send a transaction, on average you have to wait 13 seconds for the next block to appear. In PoS, blocks appear on a regular schedule: one block per 12 seconds, and when you send a transaction, on average you have to wait 6 seconds. The only exception is skipped proposers, which are rare. Combined with EIP 1559, this will massively improve Ethereum's UX.
  • Faster pre-finality confirmation: we talk about finality, where after ~2 epochs a block gets confirmed in such a way that it cannot feasibly be reverted. But even before then, security ramps up much more quickly than in PoW, because the LMD GHOST fork choice rule with hundreds of attestations in parallel creates much faster convergence than PoW's "one consensus step per block" model. After even just 12 seconds, a block already has hundreds of attesters supporting it, already making it very hard to revert.
  • Better light client protocols: light clients for PoW ethereum exist, but they are far less efficient than they could be, and they still require quite a bit of time and resources to turn on and maintain. The PoS light client protocol is much more well-designed after learning from this experience, and requires only a minimum few kilobytes per day to stay in sync. This can make in-browser and mobile PoS light client wallets much more viable, reducing trust on centralized providers.
  • Faster ability to detect network issues: in a PoW network, if half of nodes go offline or start acting improperly because of a bug, hack or attack, it takes some time for this to become known, because at first there's not enough information to distinguish what's going on from random chance. In a PoS network, on the other hand, you can easily see participation dropping from 99% to something much lower within a single slot, and you immediately know that something is going on.

There are also many smaller secondary benefits. The PoS switch gives us a natural opportunity to coordinate on a time when the ETH network protocol stops supporting the pre-merge chain, resetting the amount of data that clients need to download. The existing data structures in the beacon chain (particularly the historical block root and state root list) make accessing history from within the EVM much easier (the same benefit that EIP 2935 was trying to accomplish). The SSZ structure makes history proofs of any kind much easier to implement; additionally, a more complete switch from RLP to SSZ could significantly simplify Merkle proof generation for the protocol in general.

The merge isn't just about the switch to proof of stake by itself; there's a lot more that we get along with it!

submitted by /u/vbuterin
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