SOTS #30: Staking on Ethereum using low powered hardware with Nimbus

Transcript

02:24 – u/Superphiz discusses the Ethereum 2.0 Nimbus Client and it’s focus

[Music] hey everyone i'm superfiz uh and today i'm doing state of the state number 30. i come from the eath staker community on reddit and discord where our role is to promote the health of the beacon chain i like to call myself the beacon chain health consultant what we want to do is keep up with the latest news on the beacon chain for ethereum 2 and kind of digest that for you into bite-sized chunks every day this morning we had a really exciting call with the status nimbus client team

sasha mamie and zahari and i'm going to link that below i hope you'll check out the whole call it included some of the east stakers patricio and anvetico were there with us i've known about the nimbus client for a long time i installed the client back went before maintenant launch on a google pixel phone and i had a really great experience with it but i haven't really tinkered with the nimbus client since then now that we're in mainnet and i'm looking at client diversity i see that there are two clients that have let me just say what they are so prism and lighthouse have a lot of use among home users and teku is kind of the

enterprise client and then we have nimbus which is the low power client the nimbus client is targeted at low end machines or low powered machines and it can run on a one core machine with not much ram and so it actually runs very well on a raspberry pi four gigabyte device and i know there are a lot of stakers who are running uh or attempting to run prism and lighthouse on a raspberry pi and maybe that's successful i was very hesitant to do that and i've actively dissuaded people from doing it if it's working for you then that's great and i'm not going to urge you to

change if you're interested in running a staking client on low power hardware like a raspberry pi then i think the nimbus client might be for you and there's more to using the nimbus client than just focusing on low power hardware by using a minority client you actually improve the robustness of the entire network and let me explain to you why and we learned a lot about this during the madasha loss of finality event so while madasha was running there was an issue with one of the majority clients and more than 33 percent of the validators on the network went offline

04:21 – How using Nimbus and other minority Ethereum 2.0 clients actually improve the overall robustness of the network

and because that happened the network stopped finalizing it took several weeks for the network to get to resume finalization when everything was up and running stably again if we have four clients and all of them are running less than 33 percent of the then one client failure cannot take down the network for example if they're all running 25 and one of the clients goes out then we quickly drop to 75 percent participation but the network continues finalizing and that client can quickly get up to speed but if we have one client that is responsible for more than 33 percent of the network and that client for whatever reason has a fault then the entire network can stop finalizing

until that client gets corrected in a really strange way of thinking about it not only do you benefit the entire beacon chain but you benefit all of the clients by choosing a client that has less than 33 percent majority state the problem is we don't actually know right now what the distribution of clients are we have good guesses but that information is is not shared by the clients during validating and proposing so unless it's broadcast or shared by someone we can't actually be sure what the dominance of any client is so we have kind of these perceptions and right now it is a clear perception that

nimbus is the minority client and one of the things that is superfiz will continue to do is encourage use of the minority client until we have what is believed to be a fair distribution status the company behind nimbus is known as a privacy centric company they also have the status messaging app if you're interested in running the nimbus client that's awesome i really think you should jump on board you can find installation instructions at the link below i'm going to actually link the raspberry pi specific instructions below as well there's a special set of instructions for raspberry pi if you're using a 64 gig micro sd card

05:27 – u/Superphiz explains what Status does and how you can install the Nimbus client using a Raspberry Pi

wi-fi and 160 gig ssd so essentially you can perform all of the all of the duties of a validator using a and very modest hardware i'm actually going to put this together today i have the hardware i just haven't fooled with it for a while and i'm really excited to see where nimbus is going to take us next something else is interesting about nimbus is they're looking forward to expanding installation onto other low-powered hardware for example maybe suggested that in the future they might even be able to install nimbus on things like smart tvs which

06:34 – /superphiz expands on the future of Nimbus wanting to expand onto other low-power devices

are or maybe some of the more powerful wi-fi six routers so that's a really exciting future and i can't wait to see where it takes us i hope that you take this need to support client diversity seriously if you heed what i say we might avert a network problem down the road and we might promote a more stable and healthy beacon chain network that can last for many years in the future so i appreciate your time thanks for watching and i hope you will give nimbus a try at least on a test net and consider using it for mainnet

staking thanks for your time