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Comment by salmonlogs | Hacker News Reader

Yep, a single digit amount of entities/wallets have majority control over the network.

"64% of staked ETH controlled by five entities"

https://cointelegraph.com/news/64-of-staked-eth-controlled-b...

It should also be said that the biggest entities are staking pools/providers. If one of those act up, people can unstake and leave. It's really not that different from mining pools in PoW.

1. There is no mechanism to unstake yet.

2. Having a centralized staking pool means that there could be governmental sanctions a la tornado cash coming on such "validators" for facilitating North Korean payments and such. Once again, not a good look.

There is a mechanism to unstake it's controlled to 6 leavers per epoc, reducing if that's an issue: it has been thought out. It's not live yet which is slightly different.

If a staking pool refuses to accept a block with a tornado cash transaction as valid, they will be penalized and forcefully removed from the network.

I think it's worth mentioning that a pool large enough to do malicious things on the chain and get away with it is strongly disincentivized from doing so.

It would take billions of dollars worth of ETH to do such a thing, and then doing it would destroy confidence in the coin and absolute tank the price, costing the evil pool hundreds of millions.

> doing it would destroy confidence in the coin and absolute tank the price

People seem to say that but there's no evidence of this in fact. A price will only tank if lots of other holders rush to sell before the thief sells his stolen billions.

I think it's a matter of how quickly the thief could make their profits before people notice.

Of course, keep in mind that for such an attack to work, you need 51% of the total ETH being staked. Again, that's billions of dollars right now. If you stole some coins via double-spend, you couldn't pull the money into usable fiat very quickly. Even dumping a bunch of coins is going to crash the price.

>If one of those act up, people can unstake and leave. It's really not that different from mining pools in PoW.

Can they? I know that Coinbase already blocks users from unstaking. What's stopping the other brokers from taking the same approach?

That's like saying "100% of USA controlled by one entity" - except that in the US people are stuck with one president for four years no matter what, and when staking users can go stake with someone else at any time at all.

The difference is that between centralised banking and cryptocurrency, only one of them is claiming to be decentralised and it isn’t the bank.

No doubt about that, people are in the dark about effective centralization of PoW and PoS, but PoS makes it easier to move to a new representative. In PoW, if you wanted to be a part of those centralized services with any return at all, you often had to get a spot on a mining farm, which meant you were locked into that place; even if you left, someone else just took your place, so effectively, it was the computational power that was locked in with that specific centralized mining operation. With PoS, there is no such lock-in, and changing the staking destination is a quick affair.

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