[TurningCanadian]

the "honest consensus" is the "diversity of users"; users doing the validation at least. Your rewards can be as high as you'd like, but if one party is in control of most of the validation, you're screwed. It's not the number of nodes or what you pay them or anything like that that matters. It's the actual people/entities behind them that matter.

[rosnd]

This isn't true. One party being in control of most of the validation can't do much beyond performing a DoS attack, but that's not going to make them any money.

So what you actually need is a party who controls most of the validation and is willing to go against their own economic self interests in order to cause damage, that's a much bigger ask.