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A summary of my fireside chat with @VitalikButerin at the Home Staking Summit in Singapore last week if you weren't able to attend.
*Disclaimer: This also includes some of my prior understanding and interpretation.
Part 1 of 3: The importance of solo stakers
Solo stakers serve as both the first and last line of defence for the Ethereum network.
First line = Providing censorship resistance.
Last line = Quorum-blocking set by preventing 67% finalisation of the wrong chain
As a censorship resistant set, solo stakers are typically uncorrelated and unaligned with any organisations, making them a difficult target for regulatory capture or coercion.
What this means is that, certain organisations can try to impose censorship on Ethereum but will likely only go as far as delaying these transactions.
Full censorship will be extremely difficult because solo stakers exist on Ethereum (amongst other mechanisms).
IMO this is a huge part on why ETH is the credibly neutral block space that serious money wants to settle on!😎
As a quorum-blocking set: Ethereum's social layer can organise a recovery from a 51% capture where the chain splits in 2 but finalising the wrong thing (i.e., 67% capture) will be very bad as the blockchain's past & future can be changed without direct slashing risks.
One way to prevent finalisation capture is to increase the quorum threshold - e.g., from 67% to 75% or even 85%.
At 85%, current numbers of identified solo stakers + unidentified stakers from @hildobby_ 's dashboard will be sufficient.
But on the other hand, will this decrease the cost of attack to prevent finalisation? - e.g., from >33% to just >15% of staked ETH?
Not necessarily, as there are cheaper backdoor ways to mount this attack even today. Eg. Bribing core devs or key employees of large node operators, or even outrightly buying out the large node operators
Hence, the 33% of staked ETH here represents the highest cost of attack to hold the chain hostage.
If so, then we are currently overpaying to prevent >33% front door attack today, which means there is room to decrease the budget in favour of better security against ">66%" attacks.
The analogy Vitalik uses is that if we imagine a house with 10cm thick bulletproof glass as windows but has a crappy wooden door, then we should reallocate resources to strengthening the weakest link.
The other more ambitious but realistic method is to increase the number of solo stakers such that we become the quorum-blocking set of the current finalisation threshold.
How do we achieve this? Stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3 for my discussion with Vitalik on Orbit SSF and Rainbow Staking!
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