Supporting decentralized staking through more anti-correlation incentives

Price the fault, not the victim, decentralization shouldn’t be funded by slashing honest validators for a correlation they didn’t choose.

  1. Slashing is the wrong term to use here since it has a very different meaning in this context.

  2. Validators actually do choose the correlation factors you mentioned:

Client - we don’t have a perfect picture of client usage across the network but we do know that e.g. Lighthouse is used by a large part of the network. It is in every validator’s power to run a client that is not used by a large part of the network. Even better, multi-node validator clients and DVT are a thing nowadays and can protect from downtime caused by client bugs.

Cloud - again, we don’t have a perfect picture but there are multiple ways you can protect yourself from correlated cloud outages, whether that is by choosing to stake from home/a smaller datacenter, or by using distributed validators of some form.

Relay - has nothing to do with this. A relay being down does not prevent validators from attesting.

So I don’t agree with your framing validators as victims here. If anything, it’s the other way around – the network is currently the victim of bad choices made by validators, and this proposal helps change that for the better.