As I understand it, anyone who owns that amount of ETH would probably be interested in contributing to the trust of the Ethereum blockchain.
By the time the public has figured out the plot, it's too late: the attacker has already run to the exchanges with double-spent coins.
I never said that, I actually agree with you. I was just explaining GP's point to parent who in my opinion missed it.
And, as always, sometimes folks just want to watch the world burn. It's a relatively low investment (~$50k) to become a validator, and the fine's only about $7k (.5 eth).
Imagine the damage someone with a few million (say, some baby-boomer who just sold their California duplex) could do if they wanted to.
you rug pull, divest into hard cash at peak, <any of the dozens of ways people with large amounts of cryptocurrencies get rid of those>
The point is that it can be profitable to crash the price even though you're holding the asset at the same time.
in that case, the less you hold the more profitable it is. I'm not sure I get your point...
> If you own a large amount of a currency, you want to ensure that the currency in question is trusted, or otherwise that currency would end up losing its value.
is fundamentally flawed. You can own a large amount of a currency and profit from it losing its value.
If you own a security you are long, not short.
If you don't have that, the most that you can do is to attack the network by proposing bad blocks to slow down block production. Anytime that a (selected) validator proposes a bad block, the other validators that catch your mistake will snitch on you (through attestations) and the validator will get their stake funds slashed. The more your funds are slashed, the less of a chance you will have to be proposing new blocks in the future.