I'm almost certain that is incorrect. This is an optional, expensive seeming process.

e.g. https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher

You’re misunderstanding. Enabling the “slasher feature” on your validators is an option that any validator can do, not something that only “approved” validators can do.

There’s no one gate keeping your ability to become a slasher as long as you run a validator, and there’s no centralized entity deciding whether or not to slash someone’s stake.

> Running a slasher is not meant to be profitable. Slashing is meant to be rare and whistleblower rewards are purposefully low. Running a slasher is meant to be an altruistic action, and as stated, only a single, honest, properly functioning slasher needs to be active in the network to catch slashable offenses.

Hmmm. It seems dangerous to rely on altruistic enforcement in a network built around economic incentives. What if the altruistic slashers are simply paid money to turn off their nodes?

How can you detect that people are NOT running slasher nodes?

This model assumes that 1/n is honest. This is almost as safe as it gets.

Depends how big "n" is. It's certainly not the number of ETH users. Running a slasher currently requires 1TB of SSD among other things[1]. I assume these requirements will grow with the popularity of ETH? If so, in a world where 100TB of SSD space is required the number of individuals who can run slashers drops rapidly. In the extreme case, aren't we looking at a small(er) number of well-funded organizations doing all the slashing?

[1] https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher

> However, home stakers are advised not to run a slasher on personal hardware, as it is a tremendously resource-hungry process. Slasher is very heavy on database access and disk usage, and the slasher.db will quickly grow to 1TB or more when running on mainnet.

A 1TB SSD is like $50. I put one in a small USB-C M.2 case and use it as a flash drive.

I’m pretty sure hardware costs will always be a rounding error compared to the $50k that “home stakers” need if they want to run their own validator.