SOTS #44: Graffiti tool, Berlin Upgrade Party, Stakehouse, and Nifty.Ink!

Transcript

00:28 - Welcome to SOTS #44

this is state of the state number 44 and it's april 1st 2021 it is april 1st i don't have any jokes today so everything that i say is factual um just in case you're looking for some kind of joke it's i'm not doing it today i have some really exciting things i want to talk to it's been about two weeks since i've done one of these i do them when i get the urge and today i have the urge so let me tell you what's exciting we have a friend named ramyrod who rammy rond r-r-a-m-i-r-o-n-d who i first met in the rocket pool discord when he proposed adding something to the beacon chain

02:09 - Graffiti tool that will work with any client - demo coming soon!

graffiti wall where you currently find a giant penis um hello mr penis creator we've had some chats you're a good guy and i sort of chatted with him and he allowed me to adopt and promote the idea and so i took a bunch of really talented people and put them in the same room and we talked about what we might do um to develop this idea and so working with remyrond uh colfax great wizard jcrtp um developers from the clients uh we got we they i was there i didn't do the work um they developed a really powerful

graffiti automated graffiti tool that will work with any of the clients it runs in python and it is super awesome so we're going to do a demo of that soon um i don't think it has a catchy name it's just kind of the uh the graffiti tool but you'll find it in the comments and it's really neat because you can select an image and size it and place it on the graffiti board and then it will create a text file and you can run a python script against that text file to select graffiti for your validator and this really automates the process of drawing really cool images on the beacon chain graffiti

06:27 - How can we use this tool?

board and i'm really stoked about it we this originally was birthed in the rocket pool discord and as it came around we were trying to decide like what is the right use of this um it would be a little maybe uh pompous to draw like a huge rocket pool logo over the entire uh graffiti board or something so we've decided that the right thing to do is really show the strength of the ethereum community and uh well so on piermont we're beginning a test net or a test of this tool in the next few days you can join us probably by going to the

e-stake or discord or if you check on the um on the github link below maybe there will be details there but we want to draw an ethereum logo on the pyrmont beacon chain uh graffiti board and it's just for fun did we decide prater no we decided piermont yeah there's enough time on piermont uh oh i should talk about that so in the next few days and weeks we'll be drawing a simple ethereum logo just the black outline on that beacon chain uh graffiti board i'm really excited about it and moving forward with this tool we have a few ideas that we want to put up for vote about what we'll draw on the mainnet

uh dashboard which we're going to sort of launch that graffiti project in collaboration or in coordination with uh the rocket pool main net and so right now we have about four ideas um we're looking at using uh these are ideas for the mainnet the maynet graffiti board on beacon chain um either an old school ethereum logo maybe a rainbow colored ethereum logo maybe leslie the rhinoceros or unvetica is developing a design that

maybe we'll use um we're going to leave it up to a poep vote and the poep to be eligible for is the participant or viewer poep from the last eve staker trivia game or quiz game which featured rocket pool and so there are about 69 poeps that will be eligible to vote and you'll vote on one of those four designs it doesn't matter if you can't vote we're really just trying to get a sampling of the community to figure out what the best design is and then when we launch it we hope that everyone will join us and just to to build there to create

some great design to begin with and then we imagine as it goes forward there will be forks and we can really improve and develop that graffiti wall it's just for fun but a lot of times things like this for fun are ways that we build community together and i think that that's kind of a neat thing if you participate in the pyrmont version of this test with the graffiti tool you will receive a poep which i'm imagining will be in black and white and then if you also participate in the mainnet version of this by proposing a block using this graffiti you'll also receive a poep which i imagine would be the same poep in a

colorized version so anyone who has the desire to participate can launch um validators on piermont and participate in this and you are you will get a a poem now you may it may take a while you need to make you may need to launch a few validators but you're almost guaranteed to get a poep if you try hard enough i should always point out that when your goal is met please carefully exit your validator and do not abandon it on the network piermont is an aging test net and it will be sunset soon but that's no reason to mistreat it so when you're done participating please exit your validator

that brings me to kind of the next point piermont is sun setting it uh it served a purpose for a while but there are some network upgrades that the developers want to add and they've uh launched the prater test net that's p-r-a-t-e-r and so anyone who might have otherwise launched launch validators on piermont should now consider doing that on the praetor test net with that said pyrmont is not going to go down quickly there are a lot of things that need to wrap up on it and a lot of people who are using it for uh for serious testing stuff and so uh i've communicated with the developers and

07:51 - Piermont testnet is sunset-ing, Prater is launching

they've agreed to let it run probably until the early summer so if you have some kind of mission critical test going on on puremont please reach out to me or let one of the organizers or developers know so that we can kind of raise a flag for you and say hey we need to let this person wrap up this work before we shut down piermont piermont is going going to have support withdrawn but we want to do that with the full knowledge of the community and let it go peacefully not just aggravate people by pulling out something that was useful to them without notice so there's plenty of time just relax when you do launch new validators please

launch them on prater if you can i'm really excited about steakhouse right now steakhouse is a it's kind of a branch of eat staker and it's taking on a life of its own steakhouse has a couple members notably it's led by colfax remy roy is right there up wit right there with him as a deputy and they've showcased uh their products before jcrtp has collaborated with them uh gray ghost is working i'm sorry great wizard is working with him a little bit but steakhouse started as just this single click installer idea but as we evolve as

11:28 Stakehouse evolution

the east acre community we recognize this opportunity for um for a kind of a development branch like tools that need to be created that weren't really anyone else's job but they really uh needed to be done and so the steakhouse single clicking installer is one example of that but rather than stopping there steakhouse is actually going to become a development branch of eath staker and there there's a long list of products or projects that they're working on our our primary focus would be increasing client diversity and

increasing decentralization and democratization of ethereum staking one of my personal priorities for each staker has been a ppa um for the different the four different launch clients and a ppa is a personal package archive that is so if you use linux if you use ubuntu you can essentially install this package archive and it lets you install programs uh very easily with sudo apt-get installed and so e-staker might not be the people who need to maintain those ppas but they can offer some tooling and help the clients get set up

so that in the future when you want to install a native client let's say you're an advanced user and you don't want to use this the steakhouse single click installer but you want to install on a server ideally you could just install linux on that server and type sudo apt-get install teku sudo apt-get install lighthouse prism uh nimbus and they will download everything launch the service for you and it can really streamline the process of installing a beacon chain client so regardless of whether that's their next project or even on their menu i don't know but i do want to send a shout out to steakhouse

if you'd like to participate with them you can look for our friend colfax you can find him in the east stake or discord they're looking for any developer who has an interest in participating in the community good of ethereum i know i i feel intimidated sometimes by contributing to ethereum as a core product but when it comes to steakhouse there's not that intimidation factor it's something that is that anyone can work on anyone can contribute to whether you just want to write documentation or whether you have an idea for something that should supplement the beacon chain i really hope you

will chat with colfax and share your ideas and see if there's a way for you to fit in there it's another way that we want to grow and support the community i also have a new obsession uh if you remember a few months ago i got addicted to dark forest and damn if i didn't love that game so i put probably 10 or 12 hours a day into dark forest and i'm not a gamer um i'm looking forward to the next release of dark forest i know there's some chatter about it but lately i've been playing with nifty dot inc nifty dot ink and it is a nft platform that runs on x9 and if you know me like i think it's crazy that people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for tweets or whatever to me that's just

14:38 - Phiz's new obsession: Nifty.ink

it's crazy um i know it's right for some people but it's not my thing i do love art though um and i'm not i'm not like some great art critic but when i when something is pretty i'd like maybe to have it in my collection and so at nifty.inc anyone can use their web interface to do a doodle or draw something and then put it up for sale using that platform for a dollar or a quarter or five dollars whatever and then you can use x die to buy it so it's you know a penny to buy something and or in transaction fees and it's really a great a great way to support people who are kind of getting into the nft space and aren't really into that hundred thousand dollar

economy anyone can start it is free this is not an ad i just love it um so you go to the site and you draw something and then you create it you mint whatever five of them and sell them for three dollars each and if it's good people will snag it up i will snag it up if i love it i'll buy a bunch and share them with my friends i just love the platform i can't wait to share it with more kids right now there's a little bit of a penis problem so you can't share it with uh too too wide of an audience like it's not quite ready to go into schools but if you know people in your neighborhood if you love to doodle i definitely suggest checking out nifty.ink

i hope you'll create some things because i am totally addicted to buying a dollar nft art with one cent transaction fees it really makes me happy a lot of my friends are doing it um it's developed by adam fuller and austin griffith um so i'm just getting to know adam fuller but i've known austin griffith for quite a while now and austin austin is responsible for so many of the just awesome building blocks in the ethereum ecosystem one of the tools that this leverages is a burner wallet so if you go there without metamask installed your browser will create a wallet for you on site

and you don't have to do anything if you start creating and selling art deposits will go into the account associated with that wallet and then if you want you can export your private key move it to metamask and then you can control those funds on xdi we still need a really good xdi to us dollar bridge i think that will come in time but damn nifty dot inc is awesome please come please create things please don't buy things that i wanted um so another exciting thing is east staker will be hosting a berlin network upgrade we used to call those hard forks working to call them upgrades now

16:32 - Berlin Network Upgrade livestream with EthStaker

um that is an upgrade of the the eth1 chain to prepare uh really there are four eips that i'm i'm very aware of that are going in there but it's to stage eth one for preparation for merging with eth2 or for docking to eth2 and it's really not going to be the the the upgrade itself should not be an exciting event but we kind of want to turn that on its head and make it a little fun and exciting so east staker is planning a two-hour event uh in on april 14th to kind of coincide with that it might be two in the morning for some of us it might be um the middle of the day we don't know exactly right now when that's going to

hit but we are going to have a two hour event around that and to make it more fun we're going to invite a lot of special guests um we're going to maybe do some trivia during it we're going to have poe apps and raffles and we really want to take this this thing that is otherwise innocuous and boring and just make it something more interesting to learn about and watch and so it will not be a a technical call it will be sort of a community call opportunity to get together and and watch it we'd love to have you on that call with us if you want to join us go to eathstaker.cc so there's a link for the berlin hard fork party if

you go to that you can sign up at the bottom and you can join us on the zoom doesn't mean you have to say anything you can if you want but uh we just want to kind of have a party why not have fun with the people you hang out with every day so those are the big things i want to talk about uh we'll also we are planning to hold a rocket pool main net launch party i do not know when that's going to be my suspicion is it's going to be a probably early may right now it might be late april but as soon as that official launch date is announced uh we will follow up with an announcement about our launch party

18:20 - Rocket Pool Main net launch party is happening, date to be determined

we've kind of had some discussion about whether it is an east acre event or if it just happens to be the people who are in eaststake or who are celebrating um at this moment i'm very happy to say it's probably okay to make it an east acre event for the simple fact that rocket pool is as close as we can imagine to a community good and we want to support that work um they are trustless decentralized open source um and they support all four clients at launch um and in many ways in any way conceivable they operate as a public good i don't want to say that rocket pool is

perfect there are smart contract risks associated with it so you need to be alert for those on launch that means maybe taking some time before you make deposits to make sure that everything is working really stably with that said we do plan to offer a co-app to early depositors into i'm sorry early smart node operators and probably earlier early depositors um as participants in rocket pool but speaking out of the other side of my mouth i also need to urge caution it goes both ways i'm going to put a little bit in i'm not going to put everything in i'm still going to be cautious look forward to that launch party with us um and

19:27 - Secret Shared Validator Tooling

last but not least i had a great chat uh elon murruk who is developing the secret shared validator tooling that is kind of a a new protocol upgrade for beacon chain stakers secret shared validators essentially allows you to have something seven validators running at the same time and four of those seven agree on a message before it goes to the network this is a great way for home users to prevent slashing or pools to prevent slashing i don't know exactly how it's going to unfold in the future but i do know i strongly believe that secret shared

validators ssv will become an important part of how staking works in the next year or two so i'd just like you to keep your eye out for that there is a ssv fireside chat so yeah i'm excited about a lot of things in april um and uh i'm glad to have you along with us eaststaker is an open community we welcome anybody who wants to learn more about staking on the ethereum beacon chain uh we support solo stakers we support pool stakers um we try to always be welcoming first and knowledgeable second i hope you'll join us in that mission uh

20:21 - Come join us at EthStaker!

so thanks for your time um special shout out to colfax and gray wizard who have um up to their game also to jcrtp who seems continually to create things out of nowhere and especially ramirond for uh hitting the ground running with this graffiti tool uh i think it's going to be a lot of fun and a great enrichment for our community thanks from easttaker we look forward to seeing you at the berlin upgrade call and take care