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Comment by acoye | Hacker News Reader

It feels a bit more risky than mining in a pool don't you think? If a validator pool is hacked you loose your stake.

The equivalent in PoW world would be someone breaking in and leaving with all the GPUs of all the users of a pool, what I would consider not dooable for a large enough pool.

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With a mining pool people could lose their coins which were mined but not transferred to their own wallets.

True, and it happened recently to NiceHash. Yet the miner looses a portion of generated cash, not the capital (here GPUs)

That's not how it works. When you stake your Ethereum, it gets locked up and can't be withdrawn.

When your staking time is up, then you can withdraw it. Smart contracts could be used so that multisignature wallets could be used which would prevent a hacker from taking funds provided to the mining pool.

I think a few friends and I are going to start a validator pool when time comes to switch over.

The validator pool sounds very interesting. Any experience of validator nodes for existing live PoS systems, in particular the costs of running (bandwidth costs, likely datacentre hosting costs, etc) vs rewards?

I would like to know too. I know some PoS coins are there but I do not know of existing validator pools.

The only PoS system in live and large scale active use from I have read so far (still got a lot of reading to do though so could be missing lots) is NEO, and from what I can gather the validator nodes need a stake of 1000 GAS which is currently a little over USD30K, so there isn't such a compelling case for a validator pool compared with the proposed 1500ETH with current market value of over USD1M for the Ethereum proposal.

A malicious (or pwned) pool operator could do false validation, which would sacrifice all the coins that other people have staked.

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