Vitalik: If validators act maliciously, users may have no recourse

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform reminding that a key feature of blockchain is that even if it suffers a 51% attack, invalid blocks cannot be turned into valid blocks. This means that even if 51% of validators collude (or encounter software vulnerabilities), they cannot steal user assets.

However, if the validator set is trusted to do other things that the blockchain may not be able to control, then 51% of the validators can collude and provide incorrect answers, leaving users with no recourse.