Overall I don’t have a strong opinion on this as much as I think that nobody in our community (including myself) has the knowledge or expertise to directly challenge what Tendermint has worked on for years. The Cosmos ecosystem has the most robust validator set in the industry, and they have slashing penalties. If ICON is to be described as a secure hub for cross-chain messaging, I think Cosmos has a good model for that. In order to move the conversation along I’d be happy to start with something extremely small and work our way up if necessary. Personally it would just be hard for me to justify no slashing when speaking to any 3rd party about ICON’s consensus mechanism.
Overthinking this is part of why we are in our current situation imo. ICON tried too hard to make something different and new without the expertise, and now years later we are still spending time (and dev resources) trying to fix it. Would prefer to go as close as possible to something that has been out in the wild for a while, then focus our efforts on the xCall service and cross-chain development/incentives.
And as for the impact on the CPS, let’s keep that as a separate discussion from network consensus. I’d suggest here.
https://forum2.icon.community/t/cps-improvements-discussion/3124/10