Ethereum: Vitalik Lists Down Four Major Hurdles in Implementing Proof-of-Stake

[Pegasus]

Ethereum has been struggling with scalability issues and its move to Proof- Of- Stake (POS) strategy is considered to be the answer to it. But the implementation of POS is not going to be easy as Vitalik recently discussed the four major hurdles that stand in its way to implementation.

Vitalik candidly discusses Ethereum future plans with ETH traders

Vitalik has been a busy man off lately as the second largest coin is struggling to hold onto its position in the crypto world. The recent times have not been the best for Ethereum as the coin has struggled with scalability issues, congestion of network and increasing competition in the Dapp world.

But that hasn’t let Ethereum completely off the shelf as Vitalik and his dev team have been putting every effort to get things in place. To tackle all these issues and to make Ethereum more strong and agile the team has been working on a strategic roadmap which is expected to bring Ethereum back to its glory days. Among the prominent milestones, Ethereum has been exploring PoS as a potential strategy to combat growing scalability issues. The team aims to help the blockchain platform deliver faster “block times” – the time it takes to produce one block.

While POS definitely looks like an answer, Vitalik is well ever it is not going to be easy. He has already identified 4 possible hurdles that lie in the way of Ethereum. These are:

• Having lower than expected participation rates invalidating
• Stake pooling becoming too popular
• Sharding turning out more technically complicated than expected
• Running nodes turning out more expensive than expected, leading to (1) and (2)

In the interview, Vitalik mentions,

“A lot of Proof-of-Stake systems tend to be more explicitly organized around the idea that there should only be a couple of dozen or a couple of hundred nodes,” “I use my own opinions when designing the part of the Ethereum protocol I do myself.”

One of the concerns Vitalik points out is If validators refuse to adopt the new PoS implementation and validation rates go down, running nodes on Ethereum could become prohibitively expensive. According to him moving to POS model will be a tradeoff but Ethereum’s approach is focused on “emphasizing decentralization, enforcing security deposits for stakers, penalties for rule breakers, and keeping nodes cheap to run,” he added.

POS looks like a holy grail for Ethereum and attaining it in the best possible manner is something that Vitalik and his team will have to seek it out. It would be interesting to see how will they make it possible

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