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There are 141,139 validators active in Ethereum as we speak (source: https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/), corrupting that many people is very difficult

There are 141,139 validators active in Ethereum as we speak (source: https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/), corrupting that many people is very difficult. There are smaller PoS systems with eg. tens of validators which are more susceptible to state capture. Bitcoin (the network with the most mining effort) lost 25% of their hashing power due to blackouts in Xinjiang. (Soure: https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730?s=21 https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730?s...) State capture of a majority of Bitcoin miners is comparatively easy. In addition, independent miners have less hardware and that hardware is generally less efficient when compared to the large ASIC farms. In reality a recovery would probably require social consensus and a hard fork

micropresident 5y ago
Yeah, and the way they are issuing rewards means there's an incentive to split your validation across multiple nodes to increase your changes at getting rewards. Each one of these costs electricity to run both in terms of bandwidth and electricity. And other methods introduce the possibility of stake grinding. BOTH converge to the same energy usage as mining. OTOH, the legacy financial system is significantly more energy intensive for a given financial network value. You don't think banks and wars in the middle east to maintain the value of the network have an environmental impact?
eeegnu 5y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong since I've only read the brief overview of how validators work on ethereum.org, but 141k validators doesn't mean anything when every validator is independent / anonymous and someone with 32k eth staked is actually one entity taking on the role of 1000 validators.
- meowkit 5y ago
  But that doesn’t mean all of those validators will be in the same voting committee, or that any of them will be selected to propose a new block. Many of you in this thread need to read up on how the staking is designed to work.
  - eeegnu 5y ago
    The point is that the parent comment conflated validators with people, whereas one person or entity can control many validators. That doesn't say anything about it being better or worse than PoW, but it's disingenuous to claim that an attack needs to compromise so many individual people rather than potentially just a few entities that control vast quantities of eth.
fvdessen 5y ago
Corrupting many people is easy if you are a superpower and can make laws that affect many people. With PoW you can corrupt many miners, but the other superpowers can spawn new miners to counter act.

micropresident 5y ago

Yeah, and the way they are issuing rewards means there's an incentive to split your validation across multiple nodes to increase your changes at getting rewards. Each one of these costs electricity to run both in terms of bandwidth and electricity. And other methods introduce the possibility of stake grinding. BOTH converge to the same energy usage as mining. OTOH, the legacy financial system is significantly more energy intensive for a given financial network value. You don't think banks and wars in the middle east to maintain the value of the network have an environmental impact?

eeegnu 5y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong since I've only read the brief overview of how validators work on ethereum.org, but 141k validators doesn't mean anything when every validator is independent / anonymous and someone with 32k eth staked is actually one entity taking on the role of 1000 validators.

meowkit 5y ago
But that doesn’t mean all of those validators will be in the same voting committee, or that any of them will be selected to propose a new block. Many of you in this thread need to read up on how the staking is designed to work.
- eeegnu 5y ago
  The point is that the parent comment conflated validators with people, whereas one person or entity can control many validators. That doesn't say anything about it being better or worse than PoW, but it's disingenuous to claim that an attack needs to compromise so many individual people rather than potentially just a few entities that control vast quantities of eth.

fvdessen 5y ago

Corrupting many people is easy if you are a superpower and can make laws that affect many people. With PoW you can corrupt many miners, but the other superpowers can spawn new miners to counter act.