Last winter I got rear-ended on an on-ramp and gave my insurer a quick account that afternoon. Two weeks later an adjuster called for the recorded statement and made me repeat it slower, circling back to details like where my hands were. My version held up because it was true.
A coworker who padded his claim on the same road wasn't so lucky. His timing shifted enough the second time that the adjuster caught it.
Optimistic accountability in crypto has the same problem: it depends on someone catching the drift before the challenge window closes.
Babylon skips the watcher; its finality providers incriminate themselves through math. Each one commits public randomness through the EOTS manager for every future block height it intends to vote on.
Vote on two blocks at the same height and reusing that randomness is unavoidable. The two signatures combine to extract the provider's private key, a property of the signature scheme. Anyone can submit the slashing transaction; voting power hits zero, and tombstoning is permanent.
Self-critique: that permanence is where it gets uncomfortable. The protocol is lenient toward honest downtime, an offline provider isn't punished for going quiet, but not toward accidental equivocation.
EOTS can't tell a deliberate double-sign from an honest one caused by a botched failover or a software bug. Both produce the same two conflicting signatures, and both get tombstoned permanently, without appeal.
My adjuster could ask follow-up questions and weigh intent; this math only sees the collision. Staking providers already sell anti-slashing tooling to cover that gap, rather than trust the protocol to forgive it.
Babylon removes trust from one failure mode: deliberate equivocation, not every way a provider can fail. $BABY should be evaluated based on which failure mode a mechanism actually removes trust from, not just the claim that slashing makes it trustless.
#baby #BTCStaking #bitcoin @BabylonLabs_io $IDOL $BTW
A coworker who padded his claim on the same road wasn't so lucky. His timing shifted enough the second time that the adjuster caught it.
Optimistic accountability in crypto has the same problem: it depends on someone catching the drift before the challenge window closes.
Babylon skips the watcher; its finality providers incriminate themselves through math. Each one commits public randomness through the EOTS manager for every future block height it intends to vote on.
Vote on two blocks at the same height and reusing that randomness is unavoidable. The two signatures combine to extract the provider's private key, a property of the signature scheme. Anyone can submit the slashing transaction; voting power hits zero, and tombstoning is permanent.
Self-critique: that permanence is where it gets uncomfortable. The protocol is lenient toward honest downtime, an offline provider isn't punished for going quiet, but not toward accidental equivocation.
EOTS can't tell a deliberate double-sign from an honest one caused by a botched failover or a software bug. Both produce the same two conflicting signatures, and both get tombstoned permanently, without appeal.
My adjuster could ask follow-up questions and weigh intent; this math only sees the collision. Staking providers already sell anti-slashing tooling to cover that gap, rather than trust the protocol to forgive it.
Babylon removes trust from one failure mode: deliberate equivocation, not every way a provider can fail. $BABY should be evaluated based on which failure mode a mechanism actually removes trust from, not just the claim that slashing makes it trustless.
#baby #BTCStaking #bitcoin @BabylonLabs_io $IDOL $BTW