3 ms·
>…effectively becoming the central point where power is concentrated. More ETH/= more power. In my understanding, an attacker would need to control half of all
by marcusverus 5y ago
>…effectively becoming the central point where power is concentrated.
More ETH/= more power. In my understanding, an attacker would need to control half of all staked ETH to stage a 51% attack, which would require many billions of dollars. But actually exercising this control by attacking the network would undermine the network’s security/utility, potentially sending ETH to zero and obliterating the wealth of the attacker.
This is, supposedly, a strength of PoS: the more ETH you have, the less incentive you have to attack/destroy the system.
- tux3 5y agoRight, though I think I address that in my comment. Trying to cheat through the protocol is uninteresting. You don't destroy the system by breaking L1 rules, any such attack if successful would just get rolled back by hardfork (and nevermind the 'staked money is lost if cheating is detected' system, no one would willingly trigger it). More ETH is automatically equal to more power, because that's exactly what money is defined to be. We trade it as power.
- sunshinerag 5y agoThey wouldn’t necessarily attack the system to destroy it. Can they modify it to make it more favourable to incumbents. Consolidate power?
- everfree 5y agoI don't believe they could - the protocol has some mitigations against this including an inactivity/censorship fee that applies equally to every staker.
- everfree 5y agoIn addition, certain classes of attack will cause the attacker's stake to be automatically forfeit via slashing. So in that case not only is the wealth of the attacker obliterated, but their stake itself is destroyed and the network can continue onward as if their stake never existed. In such a situation, the price effect of the negative news from the attack would be partially canceled out by the jarring reduction in ETH supply.