What Ethereum’s Buterin has to say about block time being ‘reduced much in the future’

ambcrypto.com:

Scaling, or the lack of it, has been a grave problem with the Ethereum network. While several plans to increase the platform’s throughput are in the pipeline, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has not been shying away from highlighting its limitations.

In an answer to a Reddit thread, Buterin highlighted that decreasing the block time could lead to nodes with better network connections. All while having an unfair economic advantage over their less fortunate peers. This could result in “risks leading to Ethereum mining or staking centralizing.”

The block time is the time it takes for nodes or validators to verify transactions within a new block and then add it to the network’s blockchain.

The problem with decreasing the block time in the Proof of Work scenario is that the time is assigned randomly, said Buterin. This creates a window for blocks to be validated really close together. Thus, giving an advantage to those that have a faster network connection in propagating their own blocks.

Now, this is negligible in longer block times, especially since uncle blocks still get rewarded. Uncle blocks on Ethereum are those that get mined and submitted to the ledger at roughly the same time as a block that is validated.

Proof of Stake, however, is a different ball game according to the co-founder. Ethereum requires thousands of signatures, currently at around 9100, per slot for it to get included in the next one. This significantly erodes the possibility of decreasing the block time as it could mean that several signatures required for validation would not be recorded on-chain, and thus not rewarded.

Again, this would give those with better connections an upper hand in the validation process. Thereby, sacrificing the network’s