Vitalik Buterin says that Ethereum's PoW was 'quite centralized' and a 'temporary stage' until PoS

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to comments about Ethereum's transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) from a proof-of-work (PoS) consensus system. 

Users had noted on social media platform X that numerous Ethereum community members wished the network stayed with PoW instead of PoS. That sentiment received pushback from the man who first proposed the creation of Ethereum in 2013 at the age of 19. 

"PoW was also quite centralized," Buterin responded. "It was just not talked about as much, because everyone knew it was only a temporary stage until PoS. And that doesn't even get into how we probably mostly avoided ASICs only because the upcoming PoS switch meant no incentive to build them."

Buterin included a pie chart of Ethereum PoW mining pools, showing the now closed SparkPool comprising 33%, with Ethermine following second at 21% and F2Pool's 11% coming third. 

PoW secures a decentralized ledger by requiring miners to solve complex, energy-intensive mathematical problems to verify nodes and add blocks to the network, while a PoS system uses tokens staked to validator nodes to authenticate transactions. 

Ethereum transitioned to a PoS consensus system in September 2022 in a move known as The Merge, which dropped Ethereum's energy consumption by 99.5%, The Block previously reported.