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.

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).

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.

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.

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

It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that Vitalik is part of the Ethereum Foundation which controls the trademark to Ethereum as well as all of the popular social media channels (r/ethereum, @ethereum twitter account, ethereum.org domain). Ethereum is the illusion of decentralization.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin communities are owned by one and the same person that have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just read up on the r/bitcoin history.

Bitcoin is the illusion of decentralization.

> It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin communities are owned by one and the same person that have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just read up on the r/bitcoin history.

Cryptocurrency discussions are notoriously filled with astroturfing. It’s a lot like what would happen if present-day nation states quite literally lived and died based on the market price of 24/7 globally traded bearer shares. The saying “well kept gardens die by pacifism” is resoundingly true here, to put it mildly.

Historically, the opponents to the now infamous “Bitcoin as digital gold” narrative were pushing things like gigablocks, nodes in datacenters, “Bitcoin as PayPal 2.0”, let’s replace all the core developers, etc based on populist appeals. There was no way to distinguish between those populist appeals and attempts to foil Bitcoin socially by all manner of biased attackers (and just plain ignorant people).

I think it’s rather telling that after these people forked to Bcash, they subsequently capped the block size of Bcash to 32MB and are now ironically scaling Bcash via sidechains — e.g. SmartBCH — against the backdrop of historically claiming BTC would never increase in price past $300 USD without a block size increase. To say their entire worldview has been invalidated would be an understatement.

Well, I’m not naive enough to expect something else. People are making money and protect their businesses. It is ok for me.

For some people (not for me) living in poor countries, mining was a chance to improve their lives. Now it's sold for the opportunity to give more money to those who have large amounts of money.

All these talks about the climate are so ridiculous in this context - nobody even tried to calculate how much of that energy was produced by the wind or sun.

> nobody even tried to calculate how much of that energy was produced by the wind or sun.

I've definitely seen some analysis that does? But I don't see how it matters. There's an opportunity cost there, where using solar or wind power for something like bitcoin could be better spend on something intrinsically (rather than abstractly) productive, like heating/cooling homes or whatever.

And like, if suddenly it was decided magically somehow that "all bitcoin must be produced with renewable energy" I don't think the world would be made better by the sudden rise in price of solar panels by 10x like has happened with video cards. There's an inherent price inflationary effect involved in anything that's capable of producing 'free money'.

lol, people can decide what is better for them. Every person, without mine or your opinion.

Again, until the price of things needed to build solar panels or wind farms become outrageously expensive because they're generating 10x as much value. Then yes, actually, your choices affect me and everyone else on this planet.