consensus-specs

Do you have a source for this? As I understand from the spec[1], any block proposer can submit a slashing report while including their block in the chain, and the protocol (ie: the client software that everybody runs) will reward them automatically if the slashing conditions are satisfied. The majority of validators could perhaps block this by all running forks of the various consensus client software, with some code changed to set the reward to zero, but why would they do that? [1] https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/blob/dev/specs/p...

You get assigned by a random number generator to create the next block. If you fail to create it your only penalty is the opportunity cost (i.e., you miss on the reward that you would have gotten for creating one). So at any given time only one validator is going to create a block. If you create it, it's going to be included in the blockchain. If you don't create it (or you create but due to network problems fail to communicate it), then the blockchain skips a beat and someone else will create the next one. If you want a user friendly introduction I recommend you Ben Edgington's book (WIP): https://eth2book.info/altair/ Or straight from the source: https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs

If you want more details you can always read the Gasper paper[1], the spec[2], or client code. It is complex to somebody not familiar with consensus and blockchain execution, but you might say that about any modern engineering. PoW is undoubtedly simpler but also exponentially more environmentally destructive. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 [2] https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/blob/dev/specs/p...

There is a specification of the protocol, which is open source: https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs And there are over 5 interoperable, independent and open source implementations of said specification: - https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/ - https://github.com/ChainSafe/lodestar - https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2 - https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm - https://github.com/ConsenSys/teku - https://github.com/sifraitech/grandine ...