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.
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.