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In proof-of-work, the interval between 2 blocks is controlled by the mining difficulty: in Bitcoin, at all times, it must take roughly 10 minutes to mine a block, so every two weeks we adjust the mining target accordingly.

However, in proof-of-stake, it takes a few seconds at most for a staker to verify and sign a block, so what prevents proof-of-stake systems to be flooded by a ton of new blocks every minute?

Thank you for your help.

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It's depend on the consensus and how does it design. The interval value could be defined based on the calculated result and the capacity of network.

E.g: You defined the interval between block is ~ 2 secs, you might need to calculate following these thing:

  1. Time for major nodes to reach an agreement to choose the next minter
  2. A window of time for another candidates will be able to backup for selected minter if they aren't available
  3. Time for block (or just block header, transactions could arrive later) to be broadcasted to networks and got accepted.
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    Thank you, but that means that, from a distributed systems standpoint, PoS is weaker than PoW. The PoS you described only works in asynchronous systems (because the 3 epochs you gave have a fixed time defined in the protocol, but if the worldwide Internet latency increased overnight it would not work anymore), whereas PoW also works in asynchronous systems (where message may take an arbitrary long time to transit). I wonder if there are PoS systems that also work in asynchronous environments.
    – JacopoStanchi
    Jun 10, 2021 at 8:19

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