completely making this up but let's say one of your members was a bad actor what would happen?
The short answer is that Hedera has a governing council that owns and runs the platform because they have uses for it. The council members are large corporations with lines of revenue independent from cryptocurrency, and they have reputations on the line since they are publicly running these nodes. The current assumption is that none of them would risk their reputations by doing something so petty as cheating a cryptocurrency node. Moreover, you would need a third of them to do two things to accomplish an attack: first collude to cheat, second cut off a portion of the global internet (or get half of them to collude without cutting off the internet). There are currently 25 members of the council, huge companies from different industries and countries. It is highly unlikely that that 9 to 13 of them will collude to attack the system that they themselves are building... In the future there is a plan for more widely distributed nodes, but only after the stake is well distributed. Longer answer shortly
That's a reasonable question and one that the founding team put a lot of thought into. It is at the core of the "blockchain trilemma" that proposes trade-offs between decentralization, speed, and security. All DLTs are vulnerable to malicious validators. They all address this by trying to make cheating unattractive to a validator. Proof of work chains like Bitcoin and the current Ethereum do this with delayed block times that force validators to invest ever greater energy-hungry hardware in order to get block rewards. The competition supposes that with enough validators, the honest ones will outweigh the dishonest ones in building on the longest fork which becomes the default "true" fork. But this can be hacked in a "51 %" attack as happened on Ethereum classic. In a crypto winter of dropping prices, it is imaginable that a large mining pool could make such an attack even on bitcoin if other miners go offline because falling prices do not pay their electric bills. Proof of stake assumes that validators with large stakes of the currency will be incentivized not to cheat because an attack would undermine the network and reduce price and thereby lower the value of their stake. But there are ways to game this system too, especially with anonymous nodes that allow a single actor with a large stake to run multiple validator nodes. We've seen attacks on Solana that might well be coming from validators themselves. And we've seen how validators on Ethereum have manipulated gas fees in their favor.... So Hedera is starting with the above model and will expand it as they are able.
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