If you control 51% of the network (actually, with Ethereum PoS that number is 67%, as you need 2/3 of the validators to control consensus) and people know you are malicious, people will abandon the network and you will lose your investment because no one is interested in participating in a network controlled by a crook.

It's no different from what would happen in PoW. Can you please stop with the concern trolling?

> If you control 51% of the network (actually, with Ethereum PoS that number is 67%, as you need 2/3 of the validators to control consensus) and people know you are malicious, people will abandon the network and you will lose your investment because no one is interested in participating in a network controlled by a crook.

If that 67% is also true of the slasher voting protocol, then that means you just need 33% of the network to avoid being slashed. Is that wrong?

> Can you please stop with the concern trolling?

Can you please stop trying to claim a moral high ground for no reason?

> just need 33% of the network to avoid being slashed. Is that wrong?

Yes, it is wrong.

How is it wrong? If you need 67% consensus to approve a transaction, and slashing is a transaction, then you can prevent slashing with 33%. What's incorrect about that reasoning?

You won't be prevent slashing with 1/3, you will be merely delaying the block production each time is is proposed. Every time your 1/3 of the nodes attempt maliciously delays of production of a valid block, you will be slashed, and then you won't have 1/3 of the required funds at stake anymore.

But... you can't be slashed unless a block gets processed that supports your slashing, correct?

There is an inactivity leak that gets triggered if you prevent with over 1/3 of your votes from the network reaching consensus. Inactive validators start to leak ETH from their stake until they become less than 1/3 of the total stake and cannot prevent consensus again.

https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/incentives/inactivity

Does the network recognize a difference between being inactive/offline and actively voting no?

There is no difference as far as I know. The network is supposed to finalize blocks that are almost 13 minutes old. If it's not able to do that because there is not sufficient quorum then it starts the inactivity leak phase and the penalties associated.

By the way, there is a bug bounty program. You can earn up to 1M USD per critical bug either in the protocol or its implementations.

Yes, but what is your point? You will be slashed no matter how hard you try to avoid it, unless you have 2/3 of the validators. The closer you are to 2/3, the faster you will be slashed. The system is self-estabilizing.

Social slashing. The honest parts of the community would organize and fork you away.

If you were following the current events on Ethereum, this question has just arisen in the last weeks when the US sanctioned the privacy oriented Tornado Cash contract.

You're right that for a slash to be publicly verifiable, the cheating evidence has to appear on-chain. So indeed there is the question of whether this evidence can be censored...

If you control 51% of the network, the network is fucked.

If you control 20% of the network, the other 80% is following the rules and colluding against you. (Even another 20% that are double-validating themselves are incentivized to slash you)

The people you are discussing this with clearly have no idea how the system actually works and are far out of their depth as far as considering the ways malicious actors interact with it.