Or if a nation state or the central banks see it as an existential threat, they could consider it the cost of doing business? Maybe $30B to take out Algo or Solana and destroy trust in all PoS networks? That's a rounding error for them.
While you are correct that burning $30 billion dollars to destroy trust in PoS blockchains isn't that much money, I disagree that such an action would actually destroy trust in PoS blockchains. We have seen serious attacks on a number of blockchains, Ethereum for instance had enormous amounts of money stolen or destroyed via weaknesses in the blockchain. Yet Ethereum is still going strong. Bitcoin suffered 51% attacks that were used to perform double spends and Bitcoin is more valuable than ever.
It might be cheap to burn $30B to destroy a blockchain, but what if you burn $30B and the blockchain recovers 12 hours later.
These weaknesses weren’t due to consensus failures or protocol failures, but bugs in applications running on Ethereum. If Ethereum’s protocol allowed arbitrary funds to be stolen, that could certainly cause a loss of trust.
So two of the Bitcoin examples I gave was a consensus failure which already establishes the point, but lets do a very recent example from Ethereum:
A few months ago in August 2021 when Ethereum had a serious consensus failure and about three quarters of the clients in the network and some miners [0] forked off from the miners. How many people even noticed? [1]
> "Ethereum has weathered a bug that split the world’s most-used blockchain and opened up the risk of counterfeit Ether tokens." [2]
The issue at play is that the ability to cripple the consensus of a blockchain for the most part only impacts its availability not its security or the trust placed in that blockchain. Social consensus can just reset the bad transactions. If the theft or doublespend is big enough. We've seen that happen time and time again. They are somewhat robust but highly resilient.
Now it is possible that perhaps someone could perform an action that can not be so easily reset. For instance a huge doublespend where both parties receiving the funds are honest and have traded an object of extreme value for the doublespent funds. That is very hard to pull off. For instance how do you non-reversibly send something of that much value before the fork/doublespend/consensus bug is discovered? If you are moving something worth say 1 billion dollars in a single transaction you should probably be using an escrow service. Perhaps someone will invent a better technique for turning consensus failures into blockchain killers but so far I'm not aware of such a technique.
[0]: https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1431278258222338056
[1]: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/115822/bug-impacting-ove...
[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-30/ethereum-...
You said there were “enormous amounts of money stolen or destroyed” as a result of “ weaknesses in the [Ethereum] blockchain.”
The consensus issue where one client forked off isn’t evidence of that at all. Even the article you link to says it seems that the network was stable and the impact was minimal. Even in this particular attack, doing a double spend would be rather difficult.
Spend $X billion, then just bleed everyone without power. Sort of like what we do now.
It's _possible_ that a government might choose to attack a random small coin just to discredit the notion of PoS cryptocurrencies, but it's hard to picture a government gaining consensus to do it, and it would be obvious to knowledgeable onlookers that larger coins are immune (or anyway, much better protected), so the resulting disruption would probably be temporary.
Not when the protocol actively encourages decentralization by cutting off staking rewards to larger pools, like what Cardano does (as one example). Sure, the exchanges can (and probably do) run multiple pools, but so can anyone else, and for far less expense than is required for mining.
> Proof-of-Stake attacks aren't about having 51% of the CPU that overwhelms a Proof-of-Work system, but about having 60-70% of the _value_ in the network.
If a nation buys 2/3 of the coin and destroys the network, investors (as a whole) take a 1/3 loss. Then they can (re)start another PoS coin.
Ironically the nation would be up against the old saying that the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
congrats, you've reinvented central banking and plutocracy.
