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Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

Those could be exchanges ? Which would mean they represent very large numbers of users.

Seems the most likely explanation.

The idea that this isn’t true in BTC or PoW seems like a wild fiction to me.

Wasn't a public blockchain supposed to solve this? I always see this speculation and I thought the blockchain was supposed to show the public who was doing what... instead I always see these comments about big holders and speculation who it is. Shouldn't exchange addresses be known?

They're known.

You may be right that the majority is probably an exchange. But is there something in the protocol specification that prohibits such majority? Then it raises a question, can an actor such as a government (which may have unlimited resources) to hold large numbers of ether (> 51%) to add blocks to their advantage?

Perhaps, it's my ignorance about this technology that makes me question and prevent me from adopting this technology.

There's a common misconception that once you have >51% you can do anything. This isn't true. There's plenty of mischief you might get away with (censoring, double spending), but you can't transfer other peoples money without their private key, and you can't change the rules of the protocol. You can probably tank the value of the currency by doing large enough double spends and causing problems, but in PoS importantly you're hurting yourself more than anyone else, while in PoW, you still have a bunch of useful hardware left over after the attack, and with hash power marketplaces you can attack a PoW chain while having more or less no investment in the chain itself.

You can't double-spend across epoch boundaries (~6 minutes) without getting slashed and losing all your stake.

Censoring is more plausible, though of course it still hurts you, as you described.

I keep hearing "you can't do X without getting slashed". What happens if there is a network partition that lasts for longer than 6 minutes? Which two of the diverging blockchains get to slash the other one and take all their stake?

> What happens if there is a network partition that lasts for longer than 6 minutes?

With less than 2/3 of the total stake active on a single partition, that partition stops finalizing transactions, meaning that the chain explicitly stops guaranteeing that it's canonical.

Notably, slashing cannot result from a partition, only from malicious validator behavior.

> Which two of the diverging blockchains get to slash the other one and take all their stake?

For a partition, which is not a slashable offense, there is no slashing. The minority partition stakers suffer inactivity leak on the majority chain, meaning that they very slowly (at first) start losing their stake until the majority partition has 2/3 stake again. It's not a big penalty like slashing, unless the chain remains in a degenerate state for many hours or days.

On the other hand, a slashing rules offender (attacker) gets slashed on all chain forks. The conflicting signed block from one gets included on all others for a bounty. This means that every staker must vote for only one fork at a time, which means the network can eventually determine which fork is canonical because it was voted for the most.

> double spending

Is not just double sending in one epoch, but unlimited spending of one coin.

The short answers is yes, there are various safeguards and countermeasures in place, some on the protocol and some on the social/incentive layer. But it would take dozens of pages to explain all of these in detail, so if you are truly interested in this you can search for "proof of stake security" or "proof of stake centralization risk" and you will find a huge number of resources.

Yes this is why they’ve added slashing. The human element can indeed decide in my understanding to slash the coins of those owners.

Probably liquid staking providers, including exchanges that offer that service.

Mining pools do this.

Not really the same. Mining pools simply point their capital at an api while those staking with exchanges literally give them their capital. With stratum V2 on the horizon (allows miners to construct their own blocks while in a pool) the similarities will be even less.

But either way, it's a central entity ordering transactions and putting transactions in blocks.

The real question is, how much capital do you need to be a block producer. For Ethereum that's 32 ETH; with 400K validators and 12-second blocks you'll produce one every 55 days on average.

So on Bitcoin, the largest remaining PoW network, how much capital do you need to produce a block that often?

Is your math right on that? That’s a 15% annual return.

Let's see....actually 14M ETH staked now so about 430K validators. Blocks are 12 seconds, so blocks per day is 24 * 60 * 5 = 7200. Taking 430,000/7200 gives 60 days.

But they're saying returns are more like 6%. Where are you getting return per block? (Also I think some of the return comes from doing block attestations, on every block.)

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