Community Call #12 w/ Lakshman Sankar

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[Applause] [Music] so [Music] get started hey everyone uh welcome to eatstaker community call 12. today is yes good today is december 11th 2020. um i'm here with the east staker crew and our friend lakshman sankar who is a ethereum foundation researcher i'm gonna get us started today by making

some introductions uh and uh we'll go from there i've also invited jeremiah as a co-host because he's always good for uh for the the giggles um hey man thanks for having me on i know i know i popped in 10 seconds ago i'm i was like itching my belly with the video camera and like oh crap we're going it's happening right now [Laughter] so let me start with the stakers and then we'll go from there i am super fizz my friends call me hank and um i am an organizer for the east acre community um and it's it's just been a passion of mine

um on vedica is michael and he does a lot with our um presentation um and logistics and we're very appreciative patricio worth halter is the um man behind poep uh everyone will receive a poep for attending or viewing this live call that you can claim within the next hour lamboshi is our deep thinker uh he uh understands the things that none of us can figure out and buddha is our resident link to the uh the beacon chain uh he works for bitfly as and as a representative of

um beacon c-h-a-i-n we also have with us today uh jeremiah nichol who you know as jt nichol on efinance um he is just uh we have we're kindred spirits in um fostering a friendly and welcoming community so we get along with him great and our exciting guest today is lakshman sankar and i have had a lot of thoughts brewing lately about um if you've watched any of my daily state of the state videos like and subscribe ring the bell smash the like button you uh you know that i spent a lot of

time talking about the need for trustless and decentralized staking pools and the reality that those cannot exist yet um and so when i saw laxman's article last week talking about um what needs to be done to make to bring those to fruition um i was all over it and i reached out to laxman and asked if he would share his time with us um so election will you begin just kind of by telling us who you are and what's up yeah sure uh so uh hi everyone lakshman i uh work with the ethereum foundation um on a lot of things related to eth2 so a mix of like ecosystem development which is sort of figuring out what projects to support um as well as research

um recently been thinking a lot about the eth1 eth2 merge which is gonna be pretty interesting um but also uh trying to make more of a habit of kind of uh sharing thoughts about things that are happening in the research world and um recently wrote a post kind of because i i had observed there's a good amount of uh confusion around like staking pools like which ones are decentralized why are some launch and some aren't um and wanted to kind of clear that up a little bit in the post um and uh i don't know if it's been been linked somewhere but um the basic uh you know i i figure but maybe a better way to talk

about this is maybe let you lost questions but that the high level is that um the it's to if you if a staking pool is live today um it's probably not actually decentralized when you try to withdraw from it because you'll need to trust that um whoever's operating the staking pool that their validator will send you the right amount of money later on um but there is a a change in progress actually there was just a pull request on the spec repository like just a few minutes ago um that should make it possible for like real decentralized taking pools to exist and

a number of the projects for that reason who operates taking pools are kind of waiting uh do their launch until that until that's actually possible um so i can talk more about kind of the specifics of how all that works um or i can just just answer questions depending on uh what people think is appropriate um so i've got a yeah what's that i could maybe kind of kick this off and you've sort of touched on this a little bit already uh lakshman and i had given your article uh a read over last night with superfiz and i think what struck me is i sort of have one footage someone is reporting that the youtube stream is not working

oh hang on uh so while he's working on that i think sorry i think we should be good good okay um yeah i'm just going to elaborate on what lakshman said um just before we went live for this call um so laxman's article discusses the need for um this kind of eth1 withdrawal credential and um at about two minutes before the top of this hour um danny ryan submitted a uh a pull request to

the ethereum 2.0 specs to include the the very thing that we're talking about today so one of one of our one of our one of eath staker's goals has been to push this and it looks like we're making some progress um but michael why don't you go ahead and and say what you're gonna say yeah uh i was just gonna kind of use a loose car analogy here to ultimately uh circle background to my question here and that is um if i'm shopping for a vehicle and uh by nature of looking at sort of the 2020 models i can naturally assume that it's going to have automatic windows it's going to

have cruise control and it's going to have you know the sort of standard luxuries that we all know and love likewise if i'm sort of kicking the figurative tires and comparing eth1 to eth2 by the very nature of me interacting with a staking pool service i'm assuming that it's going to have certain features one of those being that when i withdraw those rewards i don't have to trust the company it's just happening because it's on a smart contract but reading your article that isn't necessarily the case so can we maybe break that down a little bit more as to why that isn't but and then we can kind of transition into why this git edition is important sure

um so just kind of stepping back a little bit if uh kind of maybe something we're all sort of hoping for like if eth2 is successful um what actually happens is the eth1 and the eth2 state merge at some later point in time basically so this is this is what people have talked about as like phase 1.5 um there are other names for it the merge and some other names but um the idea is that if you can and and when you deposit into the deposit contract in eth one today uh you specify an eth2 address that you can withdraw to um and that's and that's fine so you can basically now withdraw to a validator that exists

in eth2 um but the change that's being kind of proposed to be made is to also be able to specify an eth1 address developed to withdraw to and what's cool about that is you can write a smart contract today that would be the contract that gets that withdrawal if the merge happens um and so then therefore you could you as a user could see that this contract exists and disperses the funds appropriately rather than having to trust uh the validator to do it for you um so that's that's sort of the distinction between the two withdrawal methods absolutely no that makes sense thank you yeah it's a little a little tricky to

think about because it's sort of like a commitment like the the the change and the spec is sort of a uh like a community commitment that we will honor this one withdrawal address in the future but it means that like you know staking pools today uh can write a smart con to write smart contracts that um you know disburse those funds then specify those smart contracts as the right keith one addresses to withdraws to in the future awesome that was the sound of a nice swallow there man good gush thanks for sharing all that and by the way is this is there like 65 people in

this zoom right now this is great this is crazy also we forgot to mention um patricio's working hard on sending co-app links oh yeah yeah i'm halfway there i i sent 40. and so we're also live streaming this to youtube do we have a youtube um a collection strategy for people on youtube um we don't kinda yeah and there's some links on our discord and i'm going to make a pass on sending the pops because or something i want to slash one um so i've been superficially following the

withdrawal methods on the rnd discord and and i saw some intense debate between different traffic parties is taking polls researchers implementers and others and and i couldn't exactly understand what are the trade-offs we are making i'm sure we are making trade-offs because there were lengthy discussions and i've been in ethereum since 2015 and i although i don't know deeply what the things meant i know when something smelled like a trade-off so could you go over what are these trade-offs that are making uh what are we missing from this implementation what could we have not missed if we took

more time um i see um so on that ladder point i mean this is always up for debate but it wasn't always clear that like ethereum 2 would merge with eth1 the way that you know we're all kind of planning today um and so it wasn't always obvious that you want to specify an e1 address for withdrawal um so that's that's that point to talk about the debate going on in the research uh discord um as i understand it right now there are two different proposals uh for how you could do this ultimately both proposals do are a way to specify an eth1 address that's associated with a

deposit one would be to do what i was saying which is basically uh at deposit time specify in the deposit contract that this equal address is where you would withdraw to and then another way is to have like a separate contract that has like is sort of like enshrined and agree on as like the registry of like eth2 to eth1 address mapping um and you know like i think the the trade-offs there are um sort of i i mean i'm in a little bias because i sort of form like the the former seems like cleaner to me but uh the main reason being that you have to add like another contract that is sort of like a special

contract um but i think there are probably some advanced advantages in like you know like it is splitting out the complexity in a sense you know like it's less less functionality just in the deposit that just the deposit contract is sort of like uh i mean the deposit contract doesn't need to change obviously but less functionality that we need to look at the deposit contract too it's like a little bit more modular um ultimately which which of these two methods kind of ends up being chosen it doesn't it doesn't change the underlying functionality which is um committing being able to commit to an equine address for a deposit in some way um that's cool i should say one one other one other kind of point

is like this is there's a broader space for what this this commitment can enable so like we're talking just about staking pools um but another another whole set of things is like if you can specify an eth1 address for your deposit well you can also you know as a as a single user who's just depositing 32-week you might be able you might you can specify like a smart contract wallet or something like any smart contract you can specify as the thing that can eventually withdraw it um and so there's there's probably a bunch of other interesting use cases that can kind of come out of doing this that way that uh are not just statement oriented i would like to jump in because um to me the obvious use is staking pools

and i know that there are other uses but i'm having trouble imagining what they might be can you predict for us what other uses besides staking pools [Music] it's difficult to predict things about the future isn't it yeah yeah of course but it's also fun i mean like let's say maybe you're like um a large custodian so like maybe not like a staking pool but more like a banker exchange or something like that uh and you want to kind of like uh prove to your like retail users uh like what the funds will ultimately be used for so kind of like

similar to the staking pool but like you know like less uh less decentralized in a sense but like basically it's like you're like okay uh the you you want to create some sort of like um trustless also to create some trustless dispersed mechanism for your user you can use this to do that um for the individual um like maybe you don't maybe you just don't want to operate uh like uh or you don't want to like uh i have to think about that a little bit more maybe maybe as we talk i'll think of something good but yeah i have i it's not it's like it's like a new space for design

but it's not super obvious exactly what you would do he wakes up in a cold sweat at 3 a.m i got the idea when i first read about ethereum smart contracts i'm like i know that this is really really interesting and i have absolutely no idea what it will do so yeah this definitely opens up a lot of possibilities but it will take time for them to become more obvious is it here's another thing um you could you could uh like let's say you have a hardware wallet with with the ethernet address on it you could specify that as with the withdrawal address and then in some way it's like your card or wallets kind of securing your eth on ease too

because like if if the ethos emerge happens this hardware wallet is the one that gets the gets against the coins okay well i guess you could kind of like i don't like that you keep saying if the merge happens [Laughter] yeah yeah i'm trying to i try to be diplomatic but like i really like these are the people with whom i can be like if you're being diplomatic what is the other who's the counterparty to that diplomacy yeah it's not it's no one it's not here um okay then my actual question if we're assigning a eth1 address on the beacon chain is there a possibility

that um users could actually withdraw from the beacon chain back to their eth1 address before the merge happens oh no no no no even if we had some sort of a mechanism to burn the eth on the beacon chain um this was like a pretty i mean there's like a lot of discussion around this much of it before my time the the decision to keep eth1 and eth2 like that bridge one way um was like pretty deliberate kind of like to keep the two ecosystems kind of operating independently so one like big changes in one wouldn't kind of like really screw over the other

or you know in either direction um at least at least until the merge happens okay so that's yeah i mean there's there's some good resources and and i saw someone message on chat yeah what's with the app just for a disclaimer i am like i'm i'm working on this like full time so i definitely am not on the side but i'm just like used to saying because i talk to lots of like skeptical people all the time um but i'll try to stop i have a an aesthetics question something that i i just haven't figured out what is what is the purpose of the address prefixed oh x01 um why not something arbitrary

oh oh why not something arbitrary yeah all right i don't get where the where the ox 01 fits into uh the big idea of things and why it is a standard prefix oh i mean it's just like the the one for eq signatures is oxo the next one it's just uh it's one bite and it's like okay next next number they're you know like there may be there may be new withdrawal prefixes for new withdrawal types um that haven't been conceived of the the the the way it was designed was to allow for that um you know kind of um specification of new types if necessary

okay so oxo is is bls public key and ox01 is each one address okay that makes sense exactly well i have another question but before if anyone didn't get your power up for example because you shine late and just message me either on the zoom chat and on discord and i will deliver so lakshman you mentioned that only recently we could make this decision because we were lacking clarity on how if one was going to merge with these two and and for years we've been discussing or us we've been observing those conversations

and and i kind of missed when this decision was made um because i remember a couple months ago there was a still intensive aid between making a shard of ethereum one and doing like some sort of full-blown migration someone is proposed to do a voluntary migration where you would just have some sort of stateless client on issue and people would decide to move their assets to another shot so every all these myths it seems that has settled and and i'm not completely aware so so what what's the current status um how how is the merge going to look like

on on on a superficial because we could talk a lot about the merge but superficially one of the main points about how the mercy is going to be um yeah it's so so right now there are there are a few different you know work streams going on in parallel um and then there's like something going on externally that we're also kind of trying to keep an eye on so the three things in parallel are you know like clients phase one which is shards and the merge um and as of now it doesn't seem like as of what i understand i don't think there are necessarily dependencies so it's you know a function of like what gets there first

and uh like you know what that what based on like how work progresses what we all kind of feel is like the right right ordering to do these things in um so there is some unknown there in that like and and hence there's been discussion about you know um emerge without shards and emerge with shards um the truth is it could go either way um i think it it kind of depends on timelines and then the other thing is like there's obviously you know the stuff isn't happening completely in a vacuum there's all the stuff happening at the application layer it's all defy there's roll-ups right and if roll-ups end up becoming or layer two in general ends up becoming

like a really um important piece of the whole infrastructure puzzle um then you know like there may be decisions that uh that you know kind of want to accommodate that reality if that makes sense um so that's a that was a kind of rambling way to not really answer your question but just to say that there's these things happening in parallel and it could kind of happen in different orders depending on you know like how how work progresses um how the world changes around us will you repeat those three things i'm sorry patricio oh uh it's uh kind of like the light client

support um uh shards like phase one and um the merge okay i do think that the answer was quite clear um if you've been on mysterium long enough um this is a common pattern we've done almost everything um there are so many unknowns unknowns and and it's so hard to predict uh how the network is going to be used but we so we this is one of the few things we learned we learned that pre-major optimization or or premature decision making it's likely going to be a big regret so

instead of rushing making decision based on the assumptions we know now we allow ourselves to wait longer and and to work on different stuff until there's better clarity about how pieces are going to fall and and the l2 roll-ups or different scaling designs it's something i know very well and i think it would be a big mistake to make these two fundamental decisions in a context where we don't have the least idea about how this is going to play out and it's very likely that it's going to play out in a way that no one has envisioned so so it's good to hear and to learn that we are just in a holding pattern until

there's very clarity about how the network needs to look like i mean there's sort of like a an like a sort of implicit design principle which is to kind of prefer optionality when designing parts of these systems so for example if you know if the merge happens first uh maybe we want to design it in such a way that you know if if it if it makes sense like it can be separated into you know like each one can be separated into a shard if necessary right and so you might want to like design things in a certain way so that's possible um so it's it's yeah there's a lot of uh there's a lot of uncertainties a lot of unknown unknowns ultimately that's a good thing because it means that people are using ethereum and people are

building in the ecosystem so it's it's really uh you know it's kind of a blessing yeah so so i have a particular opinion i don't know if it's unpopular it looks unpopular but i would be very happy if all the scaling initiatives around these two get halt and all the issue research is only focused on base consensus and shutting down proof of work and not doing anything else um i think the size of the blocks right now and the size of the blocks in the beacon chain and and the capacity we have on the network is likely enough for the next adoption

cycle maybe it's not enough for global scale but it seems enough for what we need what define needs what the enterprises are trying to test so so i i kind of like this idea that you are not working so hard on something that might not get any adoption did you say that you feel like we have enough capacity on eth1 right now for the current adoption cycle um i know it's unpopular uh but yes i believe so and i'm going to argue about that it's okay to have unpopular opinions i just wanted to to ensure that i understood your perspective like it's okay i just um i mean we disagree but i just wasn't

aware that was your perspective well i mean if we move if roll ups get massive adoption and all the d5 goes to roll-ups he could be right um i think without roll-ups we still have enough capacity for the experiments we are running and and i know experiments because i i can't really understand deep technical um subjects like uh complete the complexity of between migration is one two two and such but i do understand apps i know what dapps needs i know what the developers need i've been a dub developer for years and and nobody currently wants to use ethereum

and is out beat because there's no enough capacity or anything we had a gas price surge for different reasons that we could analyze in a different context but right now there's no team that wants to do something and says we can't do this because the net quality is too congested or anything and and there are so many unknowns and nouns that trying to solve the problem that the current developers have or their wishes can really be detrimental for for the future of the network because it can happen and it would probably happen that if you come up with a solution for the current problems you have then you have built lots of technical depth

for the next generation of problems so i i get the need to weight and structure it properly but for you to when you say that there's enough capacity on each one as it is like for example i i collect these uh what i call them internet stickers and in order to claim these internet stickers on mainnet it can sometimes be like 20 or 30 and i i find network congestion to be a limiting factor for that dap so much so that it switched to an l2 solution which for me is like a really strong indicator that there's not enough capacity on l1 um and you may not even have ever heard of those i don't know

but i know a thing or two about those stickers and and i have a clear answer because i like to collect them and and you may not don't know this but most of my stickers are on a different chain because i can't afford to have them on my net i mean i can't afford might not be the best word but i don't know how to say it in english but i don't think that it's reasonable that my sticker collection needs to be on a state level censorship resistant network compromise of 11 000 nodes distributed around the world um i don't feel that entitlement if if i get sick i don't expect to get a treatment

that maybe uh 1.001 percent of the people in the world can get and and the ability to write on such a strong consensus engine on such a this highly distributed data database is not something that any collector sticker should be able to do so so that's what i think we are doing fine on capacity uh these experiments we are running we are allowing ourselves to do things that couldn't happen at the scale but at the end of the day uh the users should understand there are different solutions for different needs there are some therapies if you get sick that get maybe 10 or 100 times more expensive

than the therapies most of the people get just because of the limited resources that you can get on on the humanity knows how to produce like if you want to get a uh some sort of a scan that requires uh nuclear therapy and building the isotope for you to get that image it's something that takes a lot of energy and there's no energy for every person that needs that therapy so only uh the top of the pyramid they're going to be able to afford the resources and it's pretty much the same on defy on on the nft space um some users are always going to be outbid from the mainnet

that's an interesting perspective it's still not what i share but it is an interesting perspective so so can i can i ask a question so let's assume that the bridge has been built between e1 and 2 and how will people that are not staking transfer the eve to ethereum to do they have to do anything and if they have if they don't have to why are people well let's ask this way let's assume that the bridges has been built and we are on e2 everyone is on if two how will staking on if to look like is it still an interaction with the smart if with a smart contract or do i have to sign a message from my wallet

or is there yeah this is interesting so if you exist in eth1 in within eth2 um you unless you are staking you pro you might not even need to move into each you can keep staying stay in this like one kind of shell within you too um and i saw someone else ask about ask about roll-ups earlier and i'll kind of answer the question at the same time it's like if you were using a roll-up that related to e1 now you can use the roll-up that's talking to each one within e2 and it's just a it's just a faster roll-up because your base layer is faster as well too now so um it may be the case that nothing really changes

um in turn and just just from the kind of like user experience developers unless you want to go steak but it's probably it may not be the case that every single person who wants to be in the whatever the ethereum ecosystem is wants to go stake but how do i send a transaction from an ethereum one address to an ether to address if i never made a transition to ethereum too oh you'll still be able to deposit in some way okay so after they pause it and then i can send a transaction on if you're into okay yeah one of the nice things is the deposit will be like right now there's a little bit more of a delay with deposits um and the deposit will be much much faster

because you know within like a couple blocks or something because it's like all happening in the same place um but yeah ultimately yeah so like i think uh if i'm remember don't quote me on this but i think it's like one follow distance kind of like becomes a lot smaller um but uh yeah that like the the um you still you still will move into eth2 in a similar way if you want to go stake but you prob you may not even need to okay and do i have to run like will there be a merge between ethereum two and one clients as well so that i only have to run one client or yeah so this is this is kind of like one of the

challenging questions that i'm may not even be the best person to answer completely but um the hope is that there's sort of like this uh combined client that you run that uses like parts of ethereum if what what is an eth1 so like for example you don't we don't need to rewrite the whole evm or like maybe even like the transaction kind of pooling mechanism but then uses the eth2 like engine client for consensus so you have this kind of joint uh thing that has an eth one piece and each two piece and that's like the new the new client is that something that an existing eth2 client could do now uh basically take parts

of something like guess and incorporate just the um just the necessary parts so that and and from my perspective i come from you know the ui like simplicity for users been done i'm sorry um i i lost my connection yeah i'll find the link but there's some good work being done by uh uh from the guest team and mikhail from uh from consensus but basically they're working on a combined teku prototype client that called catalyst that is exactly what we're talking about

so that's still in the sort of prototyping stage but you know if if current plans work out then that's maybe that's something that that'll be the thing that you run is this like combined thing that's a little bit interesting to me that that and so i get that consensus having the bandwidth would be the organization to do that but it's interesting to me that it's tech eccentric because tecu tends to have more uh hardware overhead in general so like they would be less likely to need an integrated client um but i'm glad it's happening yeah i mean like i think if it moves forward you'll see something similar for all the clients um but it's uh

it's just it's just kind of where where it's starting right now sure uh since you are our guest today um some people were asking on the zoom chat about my perspective but instead of me reinforcing my perspective which already presented and would you like to express your opinion on this uh appreciation that maybe we don't need to chant the gun on scaling design and we just rather wait and see how the ecosystem develops you mean uh jump the gun on like the eth2 side or on the layer two side like layer one of the layer two

i i mean you you cannot think you can express your opinion on any of the subjects what the people who was asking on the chat was what i think but what i think i already said and it was that we have enough capacity would you say that we have enough capacity um yeah that's a really tough question i mean i think uh it's it's hard to look at you know like it's hard to look at what exists today and who the users are today and and just say like oh these are the only possible users that could ever be a part of this ecosystem it's like maybe when you have more capacity and it costs less to operate in ethereum there's a new class of users that use the same things um and and ultimate and i think that all

of the scaling efforts sort of are pushing or kind of poking at that future it's like you know it may you know i i'm obviously very bullish and i think that there's a there's everyone in the world maybe could be using a theory in some way in some day in which case yeah you need more capacity you need other other things going on um and so like if we're thinking about that yeah i think that there's uh there's value in exploring all of these mechanisms i think also they're they're not uh they're not really competitive you know ideally they're all kind of like working together and making each other better so it's like good to diversify and be trying things layer two and layer one at the same time i like the answer because

you seem to be disagreeing with me but i know what i think and you don't you you don't disagree a disappreciation of what it's enough capacity it's too subjective and and there's a strong personality that in it it's very hard to change i mean and and there's no way to measure what's enough uh it's like sufficient decentralization by the security search your commission and my point being because now it feels like i i'm a small blocker and maybe you're a big blocker and that's not okay i think that as long as upper layers can write commitments to the main chain every once in one hour for example

that's pretty much enough capacity and comments are very tiny in in storage and well someone is asking about transactions per second but that it's still too early to answer that my vision is that we have like one megabyte blocks or even more and they come um once every 15 seconds and and maybe even quicker when we have these two and and you can write plenty of hashes of commitments on on such a capacity i don't think anyone thinks that your perspective is wrong i just uh like it is a valid perspective that that there's plenty of space for l2 and rollups to

fit onto the existing chain um so i don't think anyone is disputing the facts it's just a difference in perspective i just for the record i don't think ck roll ups or optimistic roll-ups or different sort of uh these so those same designs are the only way around the scalability solution if i were to think if i were to express what's going to be for me the most adopted scaling solution i think is going to be trust based and not math based or cryptographically secured yeah it could be that there's some there is some fundamental limit to how far we can go

with just math but i know it also feels like maybe we haven't reached that point yet so um let's say that you don't reach that limit or you keep expanding it because of moore's law and different uh pushing the boundary of computer science it's so many important relationships in this world that are based on trust that i don't think that it's so important and and imperious in periods it is so urgent to move them to crypto based if we just them the supreme court the crypto base like the plasma people like to say we have made such a big leap ahead

then we can keep relying on trust everything low level and maybe a state level but again it's a very unpopular opinion um you know i i am i'm sort of like i think i'm you know i think i think it's good to consider like in some sense not to bring it to blockchains but this is sort of like what the interoperable blockchain kind of approaches like the the cosmos polkadot thing where it's like you have a bunch of small like not like a bunch of smaller communes of blockchain activity that aren't don't share their security completely

kami is not the right word because maybe has negative connotations i think i think there's some credence to that version of the world as well um it's it's really hard to guess at exactly how things split out but you know one thing that is observable is that like you know in the in the normal traditional world we have like formed cities and we seem to like doing that um and so maybe we maybe there is room for something like what ethereum could be but uh definitely i'm i'm not familiar with the models of cosmos or or those other blockchains but i would hope that if it's proven and validated

that those are good models i do hope that the ethereum research team acquires that knowledge and and makes it available on ethereum yeah it's it's something to constantly think about for sure i'd like to kind of circle back to um your conclusions in the article because those are things that yeah um you know as the east staker base you know i work with the east sticker based primarily on reddit and one of the frequent you know daily concerns is when can i pool which exchange should i make my deposit to um and you know i have my set of

recommendations that i've been spouting for weeks and weeks do do you have recommendations regarding and i'm not asking you to definitely ask me to cite any specific custodian but recommendations regarding what people should do let's say that i am a user today and i have four ether and i i want to get involved um what would you suggest that that person do man that's a tough question yeah i don't want to make i don't want to like uh name anyone in particular but um i will say that right now it seems like the two obvious approaches to me if i ever wanted to like stick some more eth would be

to run my own validator um or to you know join a staking pool and so if you're running your own validator i mean that that choice comes down to like are you comfortable doing it i think right like do you want to be a part of the like the journey like you do you enjoy doing this um and uh and and also do you have 32e to throw to throw in because uh you know understandably maybe no one has like that on hand um and if you want to do so so the thing about doing a staking pool is and and this was kind of the main thesis of the article this is kind of like the big point i was trying to make is any staking pool that exists today uh is probably not decentralized um you probably want to wait

a little bit um um hello sorry my headphones just died um oh that's right yeah i thought it was me lagging yeah um yeah so so my you know it's hard it's hard to know exactly when things happen in this in this ecosystem but early next year um we will see some staking pools that like do this do this properly i i will point to one example just because they had a blog post about it and i want to kind of clear that up i know rocketpool made an announcement that you know we're going to wait until this is ready and so that that's that's kind of what they're doing and so like there are a few others who are who are

making that decision responsibly um yeah can you help me one of the things that i anticipate and it's one of the things that i run into when i uh so sticking pools approach me and they're like hey superfiz we will you work with us to promote this and i'm like not really comfortable um what many of the things that they tell me are well we have some other kind of model that really is safe can could you help me yeah because to me i have not really so i'll actually talk about blocks staking and i the blocks model is that um they run the beacon chain client and you have a remote signer so you

actually keep your keys uh locally but you sign uh by connecting to a remote beacon chain and and the benefit there is that you don't have to run the hardware you just have to run a desktop app um aside from that model is there any other model that you're aware of right now that um that gives the trustless security that we're looking for yeah so so i i assume for blocks i i have for the solution you're talking about is it that you you're essentially running the validator but like on this desktop app and they're just running okay um yeah like if you're not running your validator right now i would say it's probably not decentralized

okay i'll just come down yeah and that's that's really the thing that i i need um it's so important for me to help people understand that if if they're not in control of their their keys then with this long two-year wait which is really two years in cryptocurrency is 20 years in the real world um things are going to change so rapidly that it's very likely that the coins you deposit in good faith now are not going to be available to you in two years and the hypothetical scenario for this that we always see is um you deposited with a pool and they did everything right and they were perfect but

some secret malicious hacker was able to access their withdrawal keys and their faultless it's not their fault but somehow 58 million dollars are gone and the pool is sorry but you signed an agreement and your loss and that's really the kind of thing that i'm i'm so desperate to encourage people to if you can solo stake now by all means please solo stake if you have less than 32 ether things are moving very quickly right now um for this kind of uh trustless decentralized taking and you know you mentioned rocket pool and i talk about rocket pool all day

long it's not that i'm obsessed with rocky pool i think they do a great job but at this moment they are the only public pool who is really promoting this kind of solution and publicly saying hey we're going to wait until we're able to do this the right way rather than jumping in with something that may not work so i just want to make sure that was um out there and evident out there in the public does anyone uh any any guests out there want to unmute themselves ask a question or just put it into the chat as we do open mic i want to talk a

little bit about collaboration groups and so each easttaker has something called collaboration groups it's where you sign up on a google form and get connected to four other people who may be in a similar situation like maybe you know a little bit maybe you know a lot but it gives you a kind of working group of friends to bounce ideas off with off and learn from and so if you're watching this and you're like man i wish i had someone i could talk to about this you might sign up for our collaboration groups and i'll try and put a link in our youtube posting for this but that's a great chance to uh just find your small home in the ethereum community so uh yeah nolan does everyone have permission to

yeah i am giving permission to unmute yourselves so if you're observing and you have a question please feel free did i do that wrong no you're good okay um yeah question can be anything is true it doesn't have to be specific about withdrawal methods uh whether you're running a value later on have a question or you wanna propose something else for us to cover um this is a good time for me so we have ten minutes left and will someone talk about michael will you talk to us about what's happening on monday yes so we actually have uh two e-staker uh calls we have one in the morning and i'm pulling up the details right now

so i don't mess this up we will be for call 13 we have monday december 14th at 6 am that is going to be mountain standard time so you have to do your own conversion on that one uh we'll be talking with sacha st ledger uh what team is that on nimbus nimbus and then we've got another call uh later that day at and so nimbus is it's an interesting call because they run on lightweight hardware so if you're

interested on staking on a raspberry pi nimbus runs on a fraction of the system resources that other staking clients run on and we're going to learn more about them i think that's yeah so six o'clock mountain time but you can look on reddit and find more about your local time there and then we've got another one at 4 p.m mountain sun mountain standard time with david rugendyk and that is of rocketpool and so that is in many ways a follow-up to this call um now that we uh are seeing movement in the direction of of the potential for these smart contracts we want to learn from dave uh not just how this applies to

rocky pool but how it applies to the trustless decentralized staking ecosystem in general so that should be exciting with my uh rudimentary understanding reading what danny wrote about uh that pr in the description it does seem like this is what rocket pool needs to continue so it'll be interesting to talk to dave about that and get his take on it i'm looking forward to that one yeah but doesn't that require the iphone hard fork first the berlin hot oh i'm not sure i don't know well that's a great

question for actually because i understand we honestly in agreement yeah yeah instead of speculating let's ask the guy that knows all right i spaced out for a second what's the question so does does this improvement require a hard fork or is it something that can be integrated as a gentleman's agreement uh just a it's an agreement this agreement that um of how we're gonna do it in the future basically or how we're going to interpret it in the future it doesn't require hard fork and so my understanding is that anyone could have used this field for this purpose before but what we're doing is solidifying that this is how it's going to be used so it can't get changed later

so someone will build their smart contracts now and then find out in six months that that field use was changed and they're suddenly in big trouble yeah exactly and so it's important that we come to agreement on one way to do it basically other than you know like have a bunch of different ideas out there is that does that essentially mean like um when the pr what's is it is it just going to be um observed and and kind of acknowledged they used to do it now x um acknowledged and then uh once it's integrated into the spec then it is kind of considered set in stone for a while

yeah roughly um so basically it's like it'll it's in the spec and um you know when people are implementing the merge in their in their clients um the way they interpret like how withdrawals work will take into account that information we're sort of like agreeing but that's how that's going to work great good i'm glad we we got that uh worked out here today yes it's like it's a nuanced thing because it's like kind of time travelly you know you're making like a commitment to work in the future when things happen uh and different and like things are different um but uh yeah that's that's that's the essence of

it so there's a good question oh yeah we can cover this uh good okay okay so my assumption that's the smart contract feature i think let's call it feature requires the berlin heart fork is wrong because if i remember correctly um rocket pool requires the hard fork to continue the project um am i wrong or am i correct i don't i don't think they require i don't think that this request i don't see why this requires uh i didn't know i i've been reading their literature all day and what they say is they they intend to release in q1 when this when this functionality is available um and that's

this is sort of at least based on their public stuff and we can learn more from dave on on monday um this is the thing that they have been the only thing they've been hanging on as far as i know yeah i mean there may be something else that they need berlin for i'm actually not i i didn't know about it if that's the case i'm gonna have to catch up um there was a good question in the chat um by member dj and he says um do we know of anyone having a true accidental slashing with a single machine and and to my knowledge and i've been talking to lots of people following the slashings we haven't found yet anyone claiming to be a slash

for reasons that weren't public knowledge like a faulty client or anything it seems that all slashings were for setups that weren't done right which is something i'm worried because it can happen that some client glitches and and slashing happens but so far that doesn't seem to be the case we have to be very grateful that the client teams have done such a good job that so far and nothing like that happened i i love that offering continually referred to this as uh the beacon chain candidate and so since withdrawals are locked since the funds are in one place it is not difficult

to roll back a a client error at this point and that's still fair to everybody because in many ways this is a candidate it is not it's not a live release um and i'm not suggesting that you know i think that's going to happen or i want it to i'm suggesting that there are fail safes in place if something goes really wonky so um we have another good question by alexander gravier and he says what can software developers who want to help with these two can do right now if anything uh maybe not only a stuff related to staking but i need to help and and i can speak by myself and

representing needs taker um each taker it's a community run by volunteers um we do everything we do like putting together these events because we want to spread the knowledge and we can use some help by it professionals that want to increase the impact of this mission of spreading knowledge if you particularly are a software developer and you want to help and i'm speaking to alexander graveyard that applies to everyone else um feel free to reach out to any of us the it's taker staples and and we will find something to help with for

sure yeah thanks patricia we have these daily conversations where we say uh hey jay khan just expressed interest how can we plug him in and then we look at what we have available and what the strengths are and we we work to get people plugged in and so if you have effort or time to contribute um especially for you know me working on the reddit what i'm looking for are commenters who just come and take care of people we have a lot of people who just come and and pour their worries out and if you can just be welcoming first a knowledgeable second and help take care of those people even if it's you know 30 minutes a day that that in itself is a tremendous contribution and if you have more uh like patricio said please reach out to us

and we'll be glad to help you become a part of our growth we definitely had a success story with that with uh j.h do you want to talk about that hank uh so uh jh is uh he kind of reached out and was like he's lecture complex on reddit and was like hey i'm here i have willing hands what can i do and that was when i was feeling buried in the collaboration groups um and so jh his his single job with eath staker is to um assign those collaboration groups and he spends a couple hours a week doing it and he's doing an awesome job and we're glad to have him and he is just plugged in really well

and so if you sign up for a collaboration group the other e-stickers we may not even be aware of it but in just a couple hours or days you're going to find yourself assigned to a group of people who may become future friends so yeah that's that's a great story i have to admit that i don't know who yeah because i mean he's he's doing a job he's um jared is his name and i know that you've you've been uh you've crossed paths with him a few times but he's just somebody who's helping by doing a small job which is an incredible benefit for all of us so um i'm sure we we want more people

like him so uh don't hesitate and reach out to us we need help in so many uh different fields uh there are initiatives that we want to run and we just don't run because we're overworked uh so don't hesitate for a minute and it could be in anything for example we just had the uh east taker community quiz show and we had it was our second only quiz show but we had two community members run that independently uh you know phil.eth and colfax so it doesn't have to necessarily be technical uh you know roles either that we need to fill if you are so inclined to help us in any way

in any of our events we have seats available and actively looking for sharing those those opportunities with people uh well we are working on the hour yep uh so thanks everyone for coming uh lakshman we learned so much from you today um i i'm really delighted that we uh first you wrote the article uh that was the thing that i needed to solidify these comments or these concepts and then that you joined us today um so thanks laxman thanks to uh the e-staker crew for showing up and putting this together uh and thanks to everyone who uh stopped by to join us today i hope you uh print your poep and paste

it to your wall yeah thanks so much for having me this was fun bye thanks for coming bye