SOTS #39: Beacon Chain Hard-Fork, Lighthouse Client Update, and EDDC

Transcript

[Music] hey i'm superfiz today is february 16 2021 and this is state of the state 39 state of the state is brought to you by the eatstaker community i am superfiz and i create a lot of the content and my friend michael from unvetica creates the post-production so thanks to him for that today's state of the state i want to talk about a lot of things i'm really excited to get to a lot of this vitalik buterin wrote a hackmd article recently talking about

hard fork 1 for the beacon chain and this was a planned hard fork it's scheduled for some time this summer so look for it in may or june and it has three things that are going to be interesting to most users the first thing is going to be like client support you can find that in the eth2 spec pull request 1203 and like client support basically means that beacon chain clients some of them will be selected to produce information that is consumable for like clients like phones and other devices and so the neat concept behind this is as we move forward with ethereum 2 people will be able to use ethereum on

light devices like phones without without needing to download the entire chain so that's really exciting one of the other planned changes is that penalties in the first six months of the beacon chain were reduced because everyone knew that people would need time to get settled in um slashes were anticipated and obviously we hoped they wouldn't happen but there have been quite a few slashings i could say quite a few about a hundred slashings on mainnet uh almost all of which are attributed to misconfigured pools and a few of which have been attributed to miners at home who tried redundant setups and found out that redundant setups

meaning running your validator keys in two places will cause you to get slashed but people are figuring that out and it has been wow almost a few days since we've had any slashings in june or may when this first hard fork is released the penalties for those flashings will increase and the third and final reason well it's not the final reason there are a bunch of smaller other things going on a third reason for the hard fork is to just actually test the hard fork tooling so that clients that being nimbus teku prism and lighthouse are ready to do those hard forks and it's sort of a test maneuver while

we're still getting the beacon chain ready uh for the merge and sharding and so one of the interesting things um that i've heard someone referred to as a bike shedding storm i don't know it was it was a great term is the naming of the first hard fork this is for the community for us this is the big important thing like forget all of the neat features who really needs you know like clients and um who needs to test hard forks what we really care about is the name and if you look at uh the pull request for this you'll see a lot of fun and snarky and unusual naming convention suggestions for this hard fork and as funny as it is i do think it's

something we should get right and at the end of the day it's not a big deal it is um just a bike conversation for fun uh so in awesome big news today pr 2149 which is the pull request to include um smart contract withdrawals from eth2 has been passed which is something many of us have waiting for for like months and danny ryan proposed it it has been it's been reviewed and worked through and it it just got some um final checkoffs today and this will allow trustless and decentralized

uh pools basically pools that are based on smart contracts to operate without any real assumptions so the big picture here is if i send my my ether to a well vetted and well known smart contract for staking when staking is over i have some guarantee that my funds will then be withdrawn to the smart contract for uh correct distribution this really limits the opportunity for any pool to disappear with funds and it really cuts down on mismanagement because we know that tools that run on smart contracts are

far more predictable than tools that are managed by people and when i say predictable it doesn't mean that they're going to operate correctly so there's still that risk of needing to make sure that um any pools that work based on smart contracts are well vetted and thoroughly checked out before you participate in them but it does open up this great potential for really secure smart pools and i really look forward to that rocket pool is the pool right now that is leading the charge toward decentralized and trustless staking using smart contracts they will be the primary beneficiary of pull request 2149 i was reading today on their discord that

a user has created rocket pool socks and will be distributing those to discord users as a as an erc20 token or maybe their erc 721 that are similar to if you remember the uniswap socks that are now very sought after so i'm really looking forward to getting my rocket pool socks and uh just as kind of a fun novelty so yeah that's just the thing lighthouse released version 1.1.1 and it has been about four weeks since their latest update this update is supposed to correct some block propagation times i don't spend a lot of time comparing the payouts

between different clients because in the big picture they're all relatively similar payouts between the four main clients are going to be pretty consistent there are very minute differences but at the end of the day the thing that is most important is client diversity and so if you if you're choosing a client you really should begin with client diversity in mind and not with thinking which pool is going to have the highest payout because within like 99 percent they're the same the benefit that you add to the network by decentralizing is greater than that one percent offers i'd like to tell you about a community call with teku coming up

february 20th at 8 pm utc with the east staker team and ben and adrian from tecu now if you don't know these guys they are gosh i don't know how to describe them they are some of my favorite people in the entire space for about two reasons they are very personable very easy to talk to very genuine and i don't mean to lump them together but they they have some of these similar characteristics that just make me like both of them they're really easy to get along with and they can describe these really complex concepts in a way that normal people understand so i've enjoyed all of the time that i've spent with both ben and adrian and i'm glad that they're both going to join us for this east acre

call you can learn more about that call at eaststakers.cc and there's also an opportunity for you to leave questions that we'll ask during the call we always debate whether or not we can open up the call to the community we with zoom being all the rage we've had a few incidents and it's just not our favorite thing to go through those but as much as we're able we do want to include the community and one of the best ways for everyone to be involved is is to submit questions uh at estate or dot cc you'll also be able to join us on the zoom and uh we will have a co-app available to everyone that uh that participates with us on zoom and it'll be put up on youtube afterwards um and finally we're looking

forward to some big news from the ethereum due diligence committee we've had a site in development for several weeks now we've been vetting products we've been onboarding and kind of setting the norms for the due diligence committee which if you've ever run this kind of group you know it takes a long time to set up i'd like to send a huge shout out to madison asher who has just done just great and ongoing work with managing that team and just building that consistency and predictability that this kind of committee really needs we have a lot of people who are um contributing in various ways um a shout out to phil who is doing a lot of the due diligence

and so we could benefit there from people who have a technical background who are willing to dig deeply into these pools and uh to help help us decide which um basically how to evaluate them thoroughly and if i can back up here a lot like you hear me talking about rocket pool a lot because it is a trustless decentralized option there are a lot of pools that are run by companies private industry um groups of people even friends who have fantastic offerings i don't intend to suggest that rocket pool is right for everyone what i intend us to promote is this wide

environment of healthy pools that all contribute to the ecosystem what the eddc does is tries to identify what pools are generally good and then also to point out what pools we might need to stay away from and that's sort of something that is difficult to work out because we're not here to step on anyone's toes but it is important that we call things what they are and one of the things we're going to need to talk about in the future is when a staking pool is slashed multiple times how does the edc respond to that how should the community regard that and i really look forward to getting

deeper into that so yeah i'm having a great time watching the beacon chain develop it's so awesome that the chain is so stable and we have such a rich and vibrant community so much to look forward to and i'm glad to be on the journey with you so thanks again for all of your time i'm glad to be on this journey if you have any ideas or suggestions for things i ought to talk about please shoot me a message and we'll keep this thing going take care thank you for your time bye you