Hacker News Reader

Even if you controlled 51% or even 67% of the staking power, you would not be able to “rewrite” the blockchain to give yourself free money. A common misconception. All state transitions must follow the rules of the chain.

View on HN

To be clear, I'm not claiming that any particular implementation of PoS is vulnerable to this exact attack. It's an illustrative example of one class of attack that is a danger on PoS chains but not PoW chains, and might help people intuit why PoS implementations are more complex.

Coming back down to earth, this is why ETH requires checkpoints[1], but PoW chains do not[2].

[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

[2]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75733/why-does-b...

ethereum PoS finality is part of the mechanical consensus protocol and established every epoch or two automatically, vs Bitcoin “checkpoints” that were hardcoded into clients. not really comparable

Reply on news.ycombinator.com