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Comment by viscanti | Hacker News Reader

But as soon as someone bought 51% of ETH and abused their influence, their investment would go to zero. I'm not sure I get the scenario where it's worthwhile for someone to invest the amount it would take to get that significant of an ownership percentage and then do something that would just cause everyone else to leave and it to be worthless. Maybe I'm missing something here.

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Why would they publish that fact? You can pretend to be as many independent validators as you like.

Apparently, 51% attacks aren't enough to put off investors, as ETC had 3 of them in one month last year.

It's more like, people who hold a large enough stake can collude on what rules the blockchain implements. Lets say an Ethereum 3.0 is proposed that benefits the blockchain at the slight expense of stakeholders, you think they'll approve that proposal?

To participate in the PoS “validation” network, you need a minimal amount of tokens (coins). It raises the bar for many people.

Can't you delegate your ETH with other people you trust? Isn't that an arbitrary decision that seems likely to change (ETH is famous for making sure that people can run a full node on an older and underpowered laptop)?

Not sure how it changes the question I had anyway. The point I was responding to suggested that people might buy a bunch of ETH to influence the network. My question was about how that could be economically viable because it would take a very large investment to get any real influence would cost more than what they could get out of it (the value of the ETH they bought to influence the network would go to zero).

It's not possible to abuse the power in this case. You either use it or not. Either for your profit or not. Vitalik made his choice, many other holders will do approximately the same.

Why buy the ETH, when stealing it out of buggy defi contracts is so much cheaper?

Why don't we setup a panel of PhDs who will vet all new contracts? Sounds fresh.

Or, maybe we can step back from this whole discussion and consider that maybe, just maybe, tying block-production to coin-ownership in a blockchain with undecidable smart contracts and a less-than-stellar security record is an exercise in tempting fate.

I see your point, but you could perhaps do what they are doing to fiat currencies (and to our countries), exploit them slowly.

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