Translated @BabylonLabs_io ’s relay and monitoring documents—there’s a line that keeps showing up that really hooked me: “You only need at least one honest operator.” Vigilante relay, Monitor watchtower—everything in the security alert system is built on this assumption.

At first, I thought this assumption was so weak it might as well not exist. Among over a billion people, can’t you even find an honest one? Then I tried placing the assumption into a real operating environment, and that’s when I tasted the meaning.$LAB

What it doesn’t require is that “there exists a good person somewhere in the world.” Instead, it requires that there is a person you can trust who is actually running the machinery and watching: watching whether the Bitcoin chain and Babylon light client are consistent or inconsistent; watching whether checkpoints are timely; watching whether the slashing transactions are executed or not; and if no one is executing, then Monitor itself performs slashing using the leaked private key. In the end, the whole security net converges to this: at least one person hasn’t gone offline for the day. Bitcoin itself relies on economic incentives; this monitoring relies on operational discipline—two security properties of completely different textures.$VELVET

So its real meaning is: cryptography ensures that wrongdoing will be caught; operations ensure that once caught, it will be executed; the middle part is patched in by humans.

But the good news is that any stakeholder can run their own Monitor—including stakers themselves. The barrier is lower than you’d imagine.

Here’s my low-tech way to evaluate the $BABY system’s maturity: look at how many people in the community are actually running monitoring, rather than how detailed the documentation is.#baby .