This video is a follow up to my video I posted earlier this week:
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Hey @bigpey, I watched both of your videos. In the second video @ ~20:00 you mention that to mount a Sybil attack all you need to do is “buy 51%” of ADA.
However, if you owned 51% of all ADA you are the most deeply invested party of the network. Why would you attack it? It’s mostly your money, why would you want any bad thing to happen to it? 
So buying 51% ADA is not really Sybil attack. However, if it were possible to take control of 51% of stake without buying a lot of ADA, then it is possible to attack the network at a low cost. If we want the network to be secure we do not want the attacker to gain control of 51% of stake at a low cost.
Stake pools without any pledge DO allow stake pools to offer lowest possible cost and margin and thereby attract a lot of stake without owning much ADA more than that’s needed in transaction fees to setup the pools. This allows anyone to setup a large number of pools to which delegators will flock and saturate. Having control over a large amount of stake like this the owner of the pools can choose to attack the network without spending a lot of money.
The pledge in ADA requires that the pool owner/operator own a significant amount of ADA. The pledge has to be high enough to make the pool owner incur a significant cost in order to gain control over 51% of the stake in the network. The higher the pledge, the more secure the network is.
If it’s too high we may not find enough stake pool operators that are willing to lock up so much ADA perpetually.
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Nice catch, I will make sure to pin a comment correcting that. I mention this in the video but to get 51% you must create attractive low cost pools and obtain 51% delegation. In 50 minutes of talking it’s pretty easy to say a couple of mistakes. Thank you for pointing this out for me.
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