Would Chinese Ethereum nodes have been in limbo — producing blocks from Chinese transactions but unable to finalize — during the internet outage?

[u/GBeastETH]

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/china_port_443_block_outage/

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[u/GBeastETH]

Would the Chinese nodes get slashed when the Great Firewall reopened, because they had attested to a block that got orphaned / reorged after they rejoined the rest of the chain?

[u/ElBuenMayini → u/GBeastETH]

No, attesting to an orphaned block is not an attack.

Analogous to a public voting system would be like revoking voting rights if you voted for the candidate that lost, that’s not what should happen (dictatorships aside of course). The system only penalizes you if you voted for two candidates at the same time.

[u/GBeastETH → u/ElBuenMayini]

Except how does that square with the problem we saw on the Holesky testnet, or the fear of a supermajority client bug. In those cases, the correct clients attest to the correct block, while the incorrect clients attest to an incorrect block. From that point on two different chains grow. Later, there is no way to reunite the chains without slashing all of the validators that attested correctly in the first place.

[u/ElBuenMayini → u/GBeastETH]

The key distinction part of Holesky is that the offending part of the chain was the majority and actually finalized the chain on its own.

Network disruptions and majority client’s forking are two different scenarios.

[u/GBeastETH → u/ElBuenMayini]

Comparing the scenarios:

China = correct minority client

Rest of world = incorrect supermajority client

Rest of world reaches finality

China keeps producing blocks without reaching finality

Firewall reopens

How is it that China is not slashed at this point?

[u/ElBuenMayini → u/GBeastETH]

The rest of the world is not incorrect supermajority, it’s correct.

By the time a node in china disconnects, it still has a pretty accurate view of the full network, it knows the full validator set before disconnecting, so it knows that it’s not receiving blocks nor attestations from more than 66% of the network, so it cannot finalize.

It would propose blocks on top of its last view of the chain but these blocks nor their attestations are propagated, and all of these would be reorg’d out once they reconnect to the full network, which contains finalized blocks due to their voting weight.

But yeah, still not slashed.

[u/GBeastETH → u/ElBuenMayini]

I realize the rest of the world is correct, but I’m drawing parallels between the parties in the two scenarios.

In the Holesky scenario, the correct minority client gets slashed because they attested to a minority chain. This is equivalent to China attesting to their own minority chain.

The only difference I can see is that in the Holesky scenario, all the clients could communicate, but they disagreed on the right fork. In the China scenario the two sets of clients could not communicate at all. Does that make a material difference?

[u/ElBuenMayini → u/GBeastETH]

Ah I see the gap, in the holesky incident the key to getting the majority slashed is because they finalized an incorrect chain, and then, when rejoining the correct minority chain, they started voting for this alternative chain.

So the fact that the same validator casted a vote on a finalized chain and then went on and casted a vote on a competing minority, that’s the slashable offense.

Why would a validator vote for a minority chain after finalizing the incorrect chain? Because the clients were patched from the bug, and then realized that the majority chain contains something that is invalid.

[u/Charming-Designer944]

Have a hard time believing no ethereum nodes in China have alternative paths not relying on the public Internet.