May I ask you to elaborate a bit? What is they are centralized around? Capital? Misbehaving capital can easily be destroyed in PoS by a fork. Please see Steem/Hive case.
I think the idea is that if piles of money grow proportionally to their size, the biggest pile of money will grow the fastest, effectively becoming the central point where power is concentrated.
With proof of work, the same effect exists, thought it involves a loop where hashrate is exchanged for money, which is converted into more efficient hashrate at a TSMC fab.
An actor that openly attacks the network will quickly be blacklisted in either system, but when you control a majority of the money there are other ways to influence the system that don't involve breaking a formal rule.
Disclaimer: I don't have the faintest clue what I'm talking about. I only have passing familiarity with cryptocurrencies, and I've read one or two of their whitepapers.
>…effectively becoming the central point where power is concentrated.
More ETH/= more power. In my understanding, an attacker would need to control half of all staked ETH to stage a 51% attack, which would require many billions of dollars. But actually exercising this control by attacking the network would undermine the network’s security/utility, potentially sending ETH to zero and obliterating the wealth of the attacker.
This is, supposedly, a strength of PoS: the more ETH you have, the less incentive you have to attack/destroy the system.
In addition, certain classes of attack will cause the attacker's stake to be automatically forfeit via slashing. So in that case not only is the wealth of the attacker obliterated, but their stake itself is destroyed and the network can continue onward as if their stake never existed.
In such a situation, the price effect of the negative news from the attack would be partially canceled out by the jarring reduction in ETH supply.
Right, though I think I address that in my comment.
Trying to cheat through the protocol is uninteresting. You don't destroy the system by breaking L1 rules, any such attack if successful would just get rolled back by hardfork (and nevermind the 'staked money is lost if cheating is detected' system, no one would willingly trigger it).
More ETH is automatically equal to more power, because that's exactly what money is defined to be. We trade it as power.
I don't believe they could - the protocol has some mitigations against this including an inactivity/censorship fee that applies equally to every staker.
I really wish the current global monetary system based on the US dollar would be this simple to change as just creating a fork. Wait, it's actually the US military (which is still the largest in the world) that's backing the whole monetary system? Ah, shucks.
