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by pshc 1440 days ago
Even if you controlled 51% or even 67% of the staking power, you would not be able to “rewrite” the blockchain to give yourself free money. A common misconception. All state transitions must follow the rules of the chain.
1 comments

To be clear, I'm not claiming that any particular implementation of PoS is vulnerable to this exact attack. It's an illustrative example of one class of attack that is a danger on PoS chains but not PoW chains, and might help people intuit why PoS implementations are more complex.

Coming back down to earth, this is why ETH requires checkpoints[1], but PoW chains do not[2].

[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

[2]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75733/why-does-b...

ethereum PoS finality is part of the mechanical consensus protocol and established every epoch or two automatically, vs Bitcoin “checkpoints” that were hardcoded into clients. not really comparable