SOTS #24: Building network resilience by lowering the bar to stake

Transcript

hi uh so i'm superfiz and today is tuesday december 8th 2020. i do a kind of daily uh youtube video about the state of the state for the ethereum beacon chain and i represent the eath staker community you can find us at reddit.com rslash eatstaker or in our discord invite dot gg slash e-sticker so i had a really great experience this morning i woke up and went to check on reddit and saw a user in distress and i that for me is you know a big signal i kind of drop everything i'm doing and make sure that user gets supported as i was reading through comments i saw

the thing that i've been waiting for for so long i saw three separate commenters giving the warm friendly and supportive uh help that that we've been modeling for months and it was just it was really encouraging so i hope you'll come and join us on reddit and i hope you'll know that our goal there is to be friendly first welcoming first and knowledgeable second and i really want to appreciate everyone in the community who is working to espouse those values as you work with other people uh that's just me my thanks and so today i had this idea um i was going to talk

about building more robust and redundant staking setups um like i wanted to talk about is i wanted to talk about having a second valid a second beacon chain um uh synced up at home uh talking about like dual internet and duel win and when fallback and so i did some poking around and some thinking about it and i'm wrong and i this is one of those moments uh where you know public health does this occasionally they're like hey we were wrong about the advice

we gave like it turns out you shouldn't be uh drinking alcohol every day because it may cause cancer and so this is me as superfiz the beacon chain health consultant saying that for weeks and months i've been encouraging redundant setups i've been maybe not redundant validators but you know having a backup of everything so that you can be the most robust setup that you can be the thing that that i've learned or that i've kind of recognized is we're at this place right now where we can onboard a lot of solo stakers if we don't make it seem

more difficult than it is it's actually pretty easy to set up a basic computer as a validator and if that computer doesn't have all of the requisites for an eth1 chain it's okay to connect to um one of the many services available at ethereumnodes.com one of the one of the eth one data providers i focus so strongly on robust setups that we've kind of missed the opportunity to include more people in what we're doing and some of those people now will be saying to themselves i can't stake solo because it's so

difficult therefore i need to go to an exchange and stake with them and that's the wrong message i'd like for us now to get that right staking is not difficult it does not require a ton of hardware it is okay to be offline if you're going to move from the east coast to the west coast shut your staking machine down move and plug it back in so if you're offline for a week it's going to take you another week to catch up that's okay like we're not in the business of trying to get a hundred percent uptime i know that's a personal goal for many people um but i need you to let go of that and focus on overall network health and resiliency

the way we get overall network health and resilience is by lowering this imagined standard for what staking machines have to be and replacing that with the reality that pretty much anyone on any hardware can stake successfully and still make a profit and any one of those stakers who is a decentralized node at home is more valuable than deposits made to an exchange so that's the shift that we need to make we need to reach out to people and welcome them not just as stakers but as simple stakers like

it's not that hard if you're somebody who's watching this now and you're like oh well i've been interested in staking but i felt like the barrier to entry was too high please by all means post on our reddit or our discord and we can plug you in with people who will gently walk you through it now please don't assume that i'm going to do all the support because i can't but one of the things that i want to do is cultivate the community of help where when you ask for help people who know what they're doing will step up to the plate and guide you through the process because it's not challenging and it's very rewarding to get done so that is my message for today we our focus needs to change from

staking being difficult to staking being something that anyone and everyone should do we should not ever encourage people to send their funds to an exchange for staking and i can say this for a lot of reasons i know that uh you know some people say well i've been with the exchange for years and i trust it that's just the wrong attitude they can disappear overnight anything can happen um you need to be the custodian of your private keys at all times if you cannot stake at home just keep your keys keep your coins um i'm not opposed to exchanges i'm a

fan of them but they're not the right service for staking your coins and so i want to talk really quickly for two seconds about this red yellow and green hierarchy that i've had before i'm going to do green yellow red green is if you can stake it at home solo do it if you're not sure how to do it reach out to us let us help you it's not a big deal yellow is trustless and decentralized pools for people with less than 32 ether those are coming very soon but they're not here yet so basically if you have less than 32 ether it's not time for you to stake yet that time is coming very soon and finally is the red that those are custodial pools and exchanges don't send your ether to

them for staking don't let your friends do that don't let your mom do it don't let your uncle do it ethereum is healthy when we uh stick to a few of these common standards that include not letting exchanges become the the staking solution the staking solution for ethereum needs to remain decentralized and i look forward to your help in that and i'm so excited about moving forward with you thanks for your time have a great day