Mining does not really “process transactions” in the sense that you might be thinking it does. Fundamentally miners are competing for the chance to create the next block, which of course allows the miner to also include transactions in it.
The actual transaction processing is handled effectively identically in PoS. What has changed is how the network decides, or comes to consensus on, what the next correct (canonical) block is, and who gets to propose (create) it.
The 32 ETH acts as collateral, as you correctly say. If you misbehave by attacking the network, or perform actions that may be interpreted as an attack, a portion of your stake is slashed. The severity of the penalty depends on how many validators have been slashed recently. Similarly, if you are offline and not doing your duties, you very, very slowly bleed away your stake. This incentivizes the participants to do the right thing and to do their duties: both a stick and a carrot, if you will.
In a PoW network, the cost of misbehaving is effectively an opportunity cost combined with the cost of running your infrastructure. Attacking a network costs both the lost rewards, and the electricity/hardware deprecation required to run the attack. However, the network has no real way of otherwise penalizing you, unless it forks off to a different algorithm.
In PoS, malevolent actors can be forcibly exited through protocol-level measures (slashing), or even in a socially co-ordinated hard-fork that removes the malicious actors even if they have not explicitly triggered a protocol violation that would result in a slashing.
Mining does not really “process transactions” in the sense that you might be thinking it does. Fundamentally miners are competing for the chance to create the next block, which of course allows the miner to also include transactions in it.
The actual transaction processing is handled effectively identically in PoS. What has changed is how the network decides, or comes to consensus on, what the next correct (canonical) block is, and who gets to propose (create) it.
The 32 ETH acts as collateral, as you correctly say. If you misbehave by attacking the network, or perform actions that may be interpreted as an attack, a portion of your stake is slashed. The severity of the penalty depends on how many validators have been slashed recently. Similarly, if you are offline and not doing your duties, you very, very slowly bleed away your stake. This incentivizes the participants to do the right thing and to do their duties: both a stick and a carrot, if you will.
In a PoW network, the cost of misbehaving is effectively an opportunity cost combined with the cost of running your infrastructure. Attacking a network costs both the lost rewards, and the electricity/hardware deprecation required to run the attack. However, the network has no real way of otherwise penalizing you, unless it forks off to a different algorithm.
In PoS, malevolent actors can be forcibly exited through protocol-level measures (slashing), or even in a socially co-ordinated hard-fork that removes the malicious actors even if they have not explicitly triggered a protocol violation that would result in a slashing.