The stakers of even an entire state like Texas represent a rather small percentage of all ETH stakers. So the extra punishment is rather small. It will likely b

The stakers of even an entire state like Texas represent a rather small percentage of all ETH stakers. So the extra punishment is rather small. It will likely be much bigger if you use Coinbase/Kraken/... or any other centralized staking service and it goes down (including any possible failovers that they have set in place). I don't have the specific numbers in front of me but you should think of the extra penalties for centralization to scale with the risk of the network not being able to function properly, so of the order of 30-40% validators going down for them to kick in hard. Also, staking redundancy/failover is hard to do. You never want to have two nodes validating with the same keys, the punishment in case there are two validators with the same keys at the same time are very harsh. While not being up, is barely above the cost of opportunity of the reward that you could have gotten. Roughly speaking: Your node goes down: roughly cost of opportunity (you don't get what you could have gotten if online) You and your neighbors, city, state going down: Roughly above of cost of opportunity Centralized service validating for a large percentage of the network going down: Above cost of opportunity penalties. Double-validation: Risk total loss of capital.