Slashers are entities that enforce the two above rules. If a slasher determines that you're node is down, or that you're committing an attestation violation (i.e. that you're signing more than one attestation in a given epoch mainly). The slasher actually does not get rewarded here. The block proposer who takes the broadcasted slashing and and adds a proof of it to their block proposition, and get what's called a whistleblower reward. Slashing is not meant to profitable, and the whistleblower reward is quite small. We don't need a million slashers, in fact, we could operate with just one... expect the Eth Foundation to run them, among other large players who can spare the resources.
2. Owning 2/3 of nodes economically is kind of silly. You essentially just 51% the network, and everyone else leaves. You're then stuck with a worthless personal currency. Have fun!
3. More than one validator means more validator rewards, and a bit more "power" in that you're a larger component of the general validation network.
Exchanges hold the most ETH. They are a central collusion point which could cause undue influence on the network.
At least it seems they do not own a lot of the existing Eth.
The main goal of crypto - the base token and protocol rewards from PoW or PoS - is to secure this network and keep it permissionless and decentralized.
A malicious actor can cause the network to slash a validator's funds by inhibiting the validator's connection. Slashing funds seems completely disproportionate for a validator being offline.
1. So if I get it correctly, there is an actor in charge of surveiling the network. There is no financial incentive to do that which means only a few actors will be running a slasher, and thus completely remove all decentralization. Once a fraud has been detected, the proof of fraud is to be spread by nodes with a financial incentive, meaning they might spread whatever the slasher says like gospel, giving even more power to slashers.
This is a very large step away from decentralization. The network depends not just on a few coders, but also on an institution checking whether nodes behave correctly or not. The whole point of blockchain was that everyone would assume everyone was out to cheat, and came up with a way to make it useful.
2. As I said in another reply, I don't expect the most rationality and long-term thinking from economic actors anymore, especially in the world of cryptocurrencies. I could very well see a single actor owning that many nodes but still being trusted because "they're the good guys" and people remain. You would also have to be sure they are in fact colliding.
3. So, as I feared, this is capitalism in its crudest form. At least PoW made it indirect by putting requirements on the hardware, but here it's just plain naked for all to see.
I know I sound very negative but I was really curious to see how PoS really changed the dynamics compared to PoW, and now I know. Thanks again for your explanations.
Exactly. This is usually the tradeoff glossed over by PoS marketing, that decentralization is essentially lost and it's no different than government controlled currencies. Instead of the "elected officials", it's the crypto messiah's that control this currency. You can pay into it, just as you can try to pay into your local city, county, state, (assuming in the USA) etc...
Further reading: https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/incentives/slashing#the-v...
There is no separate notion of a slasher, everyone gets to provide slashing evidence when they build a block. I don't understand why you build such a weak straw-man and the push it forward as if it was the truth without even checking how the system operates.
Having >2/3rds of validators (or >50% of power in PoW) let's you rewrite the chain back in history, censor txs, etc. You control what transactions go in blocks, and to a certain extent also recent history.
HOWEVER, this does not give you the power to steal or rewrite state as you please. You cannot convince the rest of the network that you now own someone else's ETH just because you have supermajority validator power. To take away ETH or change the cabin state in any other way, you need to include a valid and correctly signed transaction.
If you include an invalid state change (not caused by a successful and correct transaction) then all other nodes will reject that block, no matter how much validator power or hashing work went into it.
As I understand it, anyone who owns that amount of ETH would probably be interested in contributing to the trust of the Ethereum blockchain.
I never said that, I actually agree with you. I was just explaining GP's point to parent who in my opinion missed it.
you rug pull, divest into hard cash at peak, <any of the dozens of ways people with large amounts of cryptocurrencies get rid of those>
And, as always, sometimes folks just want to watch the world burn. It's a relatively low investment (~$50k) to become a validator, and the fine's only about $7k (.5 eth).
Imagine the damage someone with a few million (say, some baby-boomer who just sold their California duplex) could do if they wanted to.
If you own a security you are long, not short.
The point is that it can be profitable to crash the price even though you're holding the asset at the same time.
in that case, the less you hold the more profitable it is. I'm not sure I get your point...
> If you own a large amount of a currency, you want to ensure that the currency in question is trusted, or otherwise that currency would end up losing its value.
is fundamentally flawed. You can own a large amount of a currency and profit from it losing its value.
By the time the public has figured out the plot, it's too late: the attacker has already run to the exchanges with double-spent coins.
If you don't have that, the most that you can do is to attack the network by proposing bad blocks to slow down block production. Anytime that a (selected) validator proposes a bad block, the other validators that catch your mistake will snitch on you (through attestations) and the validator will get their stake funds slashed. The more your funds are slashed, the less of a chance you will have to be proposing new blocks in the future.
- how does the punishment work ? Do all nodes see that a malicious actor changed the chain and write the bad ideas in some ledger meaning "these nodes just lost X ETH" ?
- But if the malicious actor owns 2/3 of validators, what does he care what other nodes do ? They effectively control what block is accepted
- is there an advantage to run more than one validator, if you have the money (EDIT: and you don't want to attack the network)? Basically, does having more money gives you more (power, control, anything) ?