How Does the “Nothing at Stake” Problem Relate to PoS Security and Forks?

The "nothing at stake" problem arises in a simple Proof-of-Stake system where validators have no economic incentive not to vote on every single chain fork. Since there is no computational cost (like in PoW), a validator can vote on multiple competing chains with no penalty, which prevents the network from converging on a single, canonical chain.

Modern PoS protocols solve this by implementing the slashing mechanism, which punishes validators for attesting to conflicting blocks, thereby ensuring they have "something at stake."