TLDR Tech / Crypto
Decaying Vote Weight in a Weighted Consensus
This analysis works through finalization design for consensus systems that weight validators across multiple resources like proof-of-work, staked capital, and contribution scores, showing how three intuitive fixes each open a new attack. Decaying only work and contribution lets live weight drift toward capital during quiet periods, decaying all resources uniformly can push gatherable weight below the two-thirds bar and halt the chain, and measuring the threshold against present effective weight lets an attacker shrink the denominator through eclipse or censorship to reach a supermajority with a minority. The proposed fix sets a quorum floor at the larger of present effective weight and a fixed fraction of base weight, which closes the drift, halt, and eclipse failures together. The takeaway is that liveness alignment and eclipse resistance depend on the same denominator and cannot be tuned independently without reintroducing one of the three attacks.
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