If Ethereum Starts Slashing, It Burns

The first problem is, of course, that there’s no actual slashing rule on Ethereum. Any imposition of one – taking away staked tokens from validators – would be contrived and arbitrary, effectively unconstitutional. Now, you might say, as a young protocol, Ethereum’s governance should be malleable, but the stakes are far too high for that now. Ethereum is a protocol that manages hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of value daily. The very defensible DAO rollback (in 2016, following a $50 million hack) caused a mighty hangover that persuaded many that Ethereum was a hopelessly subjective mess, de facto controlled by a small group making things up on the fly.