daily learning #4 : 3 societal risk:#1 eth social consensus
in this series, I'm going to learn: 1. eth social consensus, restaking and its risks 2. the risk of ai unemployment and potential solutions 3. the risk of mental health in the us and specifically the use of fentanyl drug
Some people are worrying that the Eigen layer and Lido put Ethereum consensus in at risk, and what are the risks and what are potential solutions?
vitalik wrote in his blog post “dont overload Ethereum consensus “:
Re-staking: a set of techniques, used by many protocols including EigenLayer, where Ethereum stakers can simultaneously use their stake as a deposit in another protocol. In some cases, if they misbehave according to the other protocol’s rules, their deposit also gets slashed. In other cases, there are no in-protocol incentives and stake is simply used to vote.
Why, in my view, a certain subset of these techniques brings high systemic risks to the ecosystem and should be discouraged and resisted:
Dual-use of validator staked ETH, while it has some risks, is fundamentally fine, but attempting to “recruit” Ethereum social consensus for your application’s own purposes is not.
Cases where the risk is high:
- an oracle that incentivises people to vote if they have eth , the incentive works in a way where the participants that answer within 1% of the median answer get 1% of the ETH of any participants that answered further than 1% from the median.
When asked, “what if someone credibly offers to bribe all the participants, everyone starts submitting the wrong answer, and so honest people get 10 million of their ETH taken away?”, George replies: then Ethereum will have to fork out the bad participants’ money.
- cases where l2 uses the validator for security but add a role that says — if the majority of participating ETH validators collude to censor eCash transactions, they expect that the Ethereum community will hard-fork to delete those validators.
- layer 2, and argues that because her layer 2 is the largest, it is inherently the most secure because if there is a bug that causes funds to be stolen, the losses will be so large that the community will have no choice but to fork to recover the users’ funds
What are examples of apps that can use eth validator set to function
- Using the Ethereum validator set to secure other chains:
- More complex truth oracles reporting on facts more subjective than price: some decentralized court system built on a not-quite-cryptoeconomic DAO.
- Price oracles: either not-quite-cryptoeconomic decentralized oracles, or validator-voting-based oracles that explicitly commit to their emergency recovery strategies being something other than appealing to L1 consensus for recovery (or some combination of both). For example, a price oracle could count on a trust assumption that voting participants get corrupted slowly, and so users would have early warning of an attack and could exit any systems that depend on the oracle.
opportunities :
- pay attention for apps build on eigen layer
- pay attention for forks
- pay attention for prevention efforts
