[DennisP]

Without slashing, I'm wondering whether they've adequately accounted for attacks motivated by extraneous factors, rather than simply for profit within the system. The abstract says "we prove that, given this mechanism, honest behavior is an approximate Nash equilibrium," but does that still hold if an attacker has shorted the coin?

With slashing, even if someone finds it advantageous to attack, you quickly take away their ability to attack.

(I haven't yet read past the abstract, so for all I know they do address this.)

[ilap]

It is much more complicated. First, Cardano use in-house built pull based network layer, so the attacker cannot exhaust your node even cannot do some resource attack against it, and even if some attacker is connected to your node and do some nasty stuff that causes protocol violation, it is just simply discomnected and dropped out of the 1000 cold list of other nodes in the aueue, and needs to wait a lot of time to rebuild its reputation. Anyway, it is very complex with a lot of mitigations of these kind of attacks. Secondly, you need money lot of money and bribe almost 500 pools (assuming nash) to be successfully alter the chain, it is like bribe 500 bitcoin miner pool from a theoretical 1000 evenly distributed hashpowers bitcoin miners/pools.