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.
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?