What's new in Eth2 - 11 March 2022, Edition 89, with Ben Edgington and Superphiz

Transcript

i'll say it now we could end up having our best uh chat before we actually record and then like anyway hello ben how are you hey fez good to speak glad we managed to get the uh daylight savings time thing uh worked out this is always there's always this awkward period in uh spring and autumn when um the the us changes clocks at a different time from europe so for the next two weeks everything in my calendar has just either moved around or stayed the same so all my meetings now clash it's it's it's a nightmare i'll tell you something interesting my wife is always like you you tell me that you you're surrounded by really really smart people but no one can ever seem to get the time

right so how bright can they really be and i'm like maybe it's me it's me i'm the problem i don't i don't do times very well uh it is um it is one of the biggest challenges of this remote environment one of my favorite memes um as a picture days since last time zone incident minus one that's awesome um i have today is march 14th and we are going to chat about uh weekend eath 2. our news um what's new in eth2 for what is this episode 89 did you see how i just mixed yours and evan's newsletter we can eat too i'm flattered sorry

uh let me see if i can share a screen yeah remember to make the font big this time i did i oh i'm on it look at that no i even uh installed a a frame separator plug-in so that i could focus on the primary frame so i'm beautiful moving up in the world uh so i'm sorry i'm just zipped away down here uh so much going on and i'm so excited um because the merge is is really we're going to get into it so i won't i won't go too far so mary's threat on testing the merge so exciting um

do you have thoughts on the merge right now it's happening i mean this is extraordinary the the only thing now between us and merge is testing so and we we really need to uh test the life out of this thing every conceivable scenario every corner case every load rate on it every uh security issue you know we've got to um really give it a huge um effort putting the beacon chain out up till now the beacon chain's been this separate thing right i mean we'll probably talk in a minute we've it's got like 27 billion dollars worth of value on it but it's not doing anything it's just sitting there um

actually re-engineering the consensus protocol of decentralized finance and the nft ecosystem and you know the global settlement layer uh that's a bit scary so yeah we we need to do a good job on this i'll tell you one of the things that has me a little um i a little confused is the the actual schedule of what schedule implies timing but the order of test nets that will be upgraded because at one point i saw it would be uh ring could be robsten gurley and then maynette um but then we also have sepolia and we're doing uh i don't i don't even know what sapolia is except i'm mining it proof of work for fun um i i would love to see like a

even on the merge checklist it's just like these are the things we need to do we need to run test nets i would love to see an ordered uh list of what test nets we expect to run just so we can sort of follow through that yeah to be fair we haven't really discussed this yet uh amongst devs um so yeah i'm not really on top of that but uh at some point that will come into play yeah good and that's uh usually i i guess yeah i'll move on um so testing the merge uh obviously ben and i have been doing this i think this is our three or four number four yeah number four we've been doing this um and you saw a thousand views on youtube i i don't as i've told you privately i

don't really check youtube stats because it uh ends up messing up my incentives or the way that i think about these things so it's better for me not to know but it is kind of cool that a thousand people have tuned in yeah i don't know what youtube exactly counts as a view i think it's something like 30 seconds or something so uh you know maybe people are not sitting there for an hour but i'm tempted to go check it out but then i don't know it'll it always has unexpected consequences on my uh on my efforts so we'll see um don't forget get coin yeah what are your favorite projects this time around in uh so i actually have been working on a list um

so this is people are going to expect me to talk about staking but the things that excite me most are this a project called nifty inc i'm really excited that dapnode is moving toward um full gui and so i want to i do want to support them uh trent is doing this um protocol guild yes that i'm really excited about those are the i think the ones at least that i have notes of like hey don't forget these um what are you looking at uh i haven't taken um a look yet at this round i shall i shall get to it soon um certainly protocol guild i shall put in a a few uh if you die into that one um

and probably the usual suspects i mean i i focus the the the effort on the um eth2 as i uh frame it um projects generally there there are just so many and it takes so long to get through everything that uh i pick out a dozen or so which um are ones i feel a personal connection with um uh try and find one or two that are that are not so well supported and you know give them a a bit of a um a like as it were um but uh yeah you could you could spend weeks in there digging around there's so much uh it's a huge success i saw i think 750 projects which i think is the right number um because

you could filter through those and find what you're interested in but it's not so many that you could never really get a a mental grasp on it um so yeah i i do 20 is always my goal like i want to fill up one cart and i don't i don't i don't have a ton to give but i it is that that time i like kind of encourage myself to stretch a little bit so well it's a matching isn't it which is the the cool bit um and um yeah and i think it's right i mean i think you don't people will come with their own interest and their own um things that they you know perspective on what the projects are and which are the meaningful ones and that's kind of how it ought to be that's how this quadratic matching thing is designed to to work right to surface

the stuff which more people are offering support for and they show the support by a kind of a token you know it doesn't have to be large you know one die tendai or usdc or whatever um but that that registers your interest and then this quadratic thing um really um measures uh the um uh aggregates that interest very nicely we've been telling people for so long your vote matters and in so many cases your vote really doesn't matter like um and that's that's not to to diminish the value of voting but in many cases people's votes don't really sway the situation but we know that with get coin

uh tiny votes tiny you know a die or five die can make a huge impact i know poapathon is one of the projects that i'm interested in i think that tap from poethon said that they were getting matched at this sounds wrong in my head but 290 die for every die that's donated and i'm like that's that's incredible that that works until the matching funds run out so um later on in the process they'll find that that that goes down and so the whole calculation is done right at the end so it looks spectacular at the beginning but so if you get a good a good number of early votes in then it looks spectacular but uh yeah um to set expectations you know when the final assuming all the matching funds get used up when the final reckoning is

done it won't be that much yeah you're right i think i i bought into the early hype um and i have done this many many times but just seeing that potential uh is so exciting 10 million eath on the beacon chain and this is this is staked like actually on the contract yeah so 10 million in the contract it may have gone to 10 million live now i haven't uh checked so if you want to throw up a beacon chain we can we can uh oh yes sir ten well okay so we need to actually go to beacon chain not oh yeah staked ether 10 million 6 574 look at that um beautiful and you actually you you hinted at the significance of this uh

that that was well you talk about the early on the modeling uh 10 million was was imagined to be an early kind of like this is what we think is likely to happen yeah it's you can see in some of the design documents when we were sort of throwing around beacon chain designs originally that as a finger in the air sort of number uh you've just gone past it it's towards the top um you can see just that paragraph there yeah sort of a modelling assumption of around 10 million ether or 10 of all ether you know which is slightly over 10 million um was our uh sort of you know when we were sizing the data structures or trying to work out um how

how things might uh um might go that's the sort of number we had uh in mind i'll just fizz has vanished so i'll just keep talking and um my wife just brought my smoothie and she she resists being on camera you're a lucky boy i am so um yeah you know we had to have some idea of how many messages will be going around the network is it feasible and so coming up with a finger in the air number and sort of basing you know the return is about five and a half percent in protocol on that uh amount staked and that felt about right in terms of risk-free returns on on assets generally so it doesn't mean we're going to stop at

10 million it looks like we've got momentum to go somewhat beyond that um and uh yeah the number keeps going up up into the right the big success here is um we're doing it right like you know from from my perspective as a community organizer i'm i'm consistently worried about the complexity of staking and i'm always you know begging can we lower that standard so that more people can stake solo or can get in but having 10 million each staked we must be doing something right um and and so now the question is like how decentralized are those 10 million um but even those metrics look really good so uh i'm very proud of everybody's work we're

doing it right yeah that's cool and this is the security parameter of the network right so this is directly related to the cost of um uh effectively forking the network or rewriting the the history of the network so uh a third of that so three 3.3 million eth is the cost of of breaking finalization on the network and then if that does happen social consensus just rewrites it and you're broke so yeah um not that i ever want to rely on social consensus but it is it is a good final backstop there i want to talk about this the 99.7 because i know it is a metric that

so we're at 99.7 uh yeah percent there and this gets me back to rated rated.network and i love what rated is doing to like measure efficiency of operators but i i i wonder if we [Music] if our target here is a hundred percent or if our target is just good enough um because with good enough we have some weaker validators who may not always be up um we have remote locations who may have lost connection but we may also have that additional robustness do you have thoughts on that yeah yeah it's an interesting one isn't it the protocol itself isn't very

opinionated about this i mean as long as checkpoints are getting finalized um then it doesn't really matter if we've got like 70 participation or 99 participation so um and you're right um that margin built-in engineering margin is there for instances when the network is not performing particularly well to accommodate lower performance validators people being offline for maintenance um you know bugs in clients you know there's a safety margin um in in the protocol there you know maybe it's indicating that we can um for example speed up the block time from

12 seconds to you know something faster um that would be interesting clearly the network is very comfortable at 12 seconds but on the other hand we are about to make a massive change to the network and you know i i'd want to kind of do the merge and then then monitor it for a year or so before doing anything drastic like that um or it may indicate that actually it's dominated by big players who've got you know high a high capacity bandwidth between data centers and actually um the network's actually dominated by by um people who are able to maintain very good connectivity which would not be so great for decentralization i feel like it's fair to guess based on

chainsafe's nodewatch.io in combination with the known addresses that that the network is about 37 individual validators which i i find impressive um you don't find that many uh individual proof of work stickers so 37 it's strong it could be stronger but uh yeah yeah i'm encouraged by that so and and those 37 are doing superbly well which is incredible yeah i didn't read this but i was curious about it uh secured number two public vulnerability disclosures yeah uh so this has been going on in the background for for quite a while um so the ethereum foundation has they run a

bug bounty thing they occasionally commission audits um and they just generally document clients and protocol issues and this is the sort of first public disclosure of that and you can look at the repo if you click on the disclosures repository link um in the middle yeah you can go there and if you go to disclosures uh at the top the folder oh yeah they go you can go there um and consensus layer i always have to think twice is that is that what i'm working on which one are we yeah and it's a big table and you can't see it all you need to scroll across to see the sort of severity and things but uh i don't have a scroll bar for that yeah

it's down the bottom but uh there you go um and you know there are links to uh the issues and the actual and the fixes in some cases and the dates and so on um wow i wish i had looked at this now i'll have to go back and check it out that is i did not expect i expected maybe eight or twelve vulnerabilities this is pretty impressive and you know a lot of these are sort of noise level i mean they are so theoretical as to be uh completely negligible but for completeness it's important that uh you know we we had a an off by one issue in teku when we were doing uh aggregation validation of signatures using vitalik's

um funky method where you can do a multiple um validation of signatures and that meant that the there was an infinitesimal chance uh i mean of like uh hundreds decimal digits chart chance of choosing zero as one of the coefficients which means the method doesn't work or no it doesn't mean that it means the method is insecure so not only do we have that something else but that's in the chat that's in there right it's technically uh um a vulnerability i i would love to see this sortable by category because i would want to sort by um you know severity and buy payout um yeah yeah i tried to do that i tried to cut and paste it into a spreadsheet but it all

turned into a mess yeah yeah the steps yeah and you know i think this transparency is important i mean when when you're in the midst of a security incident working on open source software is really hard to uh to manage right because you can't guarantee that everything's transparent and you can't guarantee that people will upgrade immediately um so somehow you've got to fix the issue you've got to get it to users they've got to upgrade and at some stage you you can disclose okay this is what happened and of course everybody can see it right so they can do a diff on your release and they can sort of identify where the

issue is track it really quick yeah yeah uh reverse engineer it so um managing it this is is tricky i'm not going to kind of spill any secret sauce here but you can imagine kind of the sort of things we do um uh on that but uh um i think this transparency even if it is post-facto is is really important yeah and i you know as for end users the result of that is um when a release is cut by uh an implementation or by a client um your obligation your responsibility is to implement that as quickly as possible not to say hey i want to see if there are any regressions or i want to see if you know how everyone else takes this

if it's a security patch then as soon as the code is publicly released people will begin reverse engineering that too to attack it and it's best to get it updated quickly yeah and we um we flag our releases required or optional um and yeah required covers a whole range of stuff a lot of stuff is not security but it might be a backwashing compatibility or something or it might be such a you know a major optimization which really um you know is significant so if you see a required release at least of teku and i i think the other clients do something similar you know just install it don't ask questions just get it done sap because there is a chance that it covers a security

vulnerability so i mentioned you here i loved uh i wouldn't i don't know what would happen if i tried to play this um but i was very uh uh so this is my five indicators the emerge will happen in june 2022. and i should caveat um these are indicators uh and obviously everyone is moving as quickly as they can this is not i wouldn't call this even a prediction really the intention of it is to kind of align the community to expect the merge in june because if we begin expecting it in october or november or december then that sort of uh you know

reduces the uh reduces our tenacity toward that goal so let's see danny answered go ahead yeah i i i tend to agree that it's i i call it um a planning goal it's um it's not a deadline uh we shouldn't think of it as a deadline if we don't hit june we haven't missed the deadline we've just you know taken a a view that it wasn't the right timing but as a planning goal to focus everybody's minds this is what we did for the initial beacon chain launch right yeah there came a point where danny just kind of rang around all the teams and said right december the first good for you and we'd say yeah and then

and uh and then that was set in not set in stone but that was the date and everyone just pulled out all the stops to hit that date we haven't quite got to that point with um with the merge um we haven't sort of said okay the date is like june 30th or whatever but at some point in the next month or so i imagine we will we will do that yeah um so june is a fair target and that doesn't mean it's going to happen in june obviously we just said that ten times uh sorry let's see devnet five i saw that but i didn't really follow it closely yeah um i think yeah the ethereum foundation's been largely kind of

running the the devnets that we've uh been doing um parry is is incredible i mean he's a devops genius and has just automated everything um and can spin these things up apparently effortlessly i'm sure he's paddling like fury in the background but uh yeah um so what i was slightly surprised by is we put back the uh launch of kiln as a public test net by by ten days or so and that wasn't sort of flagged or discussed we'd agreed something a bit different at the last uh the previous devs call um we discussed it on the last devs call uh and it was just the thinking was that clients weren't well documented or didn't have the nice easy to use options

in in a release so um just to give a bit more time for for client teams to catch up shouldn't delay anything we tested all the technical stuff in merged devnet five so all the changes um technical changes were tested then so as i kind of suggested in my tea leaves the fact that you're counting days means that um it's budgeted and that you know the the intention is to stay within the budget so that's that in itself is very exciting yeah no no strictly budgeted in we've got n days and now we've got n minus 10 but it's sort of like um we we had this experience with the altair fork but it that it was scheduled sort of kind of

not hard scheduled but it was loosely shady for late june-ish and we ended up delivering in october and it wasn't one big thing that tripped us up it was just an accumulation of small delays a week here in a week there so i'm a little sensitive to it so that's why i brought it up on the last stepsicle but danny gave a good answer yeah i appreciate that uh that you're keeping track of that it's it makes me happy so we're talking about kiln kiln is running right now both as um yeah both as a beacon chain and as a execution layer chain um you can go to what is it

kiln.themerge.dev there are a bunch of walkthrough guides i think we're going to chat about those in a moment and so uh i know that the the current plan is for the merge to happen around wednesday is that your understanding as well uh yeah that's kind of what it's looking like it's hard to tell right um so uh we had this little drama just uh before the weekend so there are three events in the life of a test note like this right there's a proof of work genesis so you kick off the proof work chain there's a beacon chain genesis um so you kick that off it's a different process um so proof work genesis happened last thursday beacon chain genesis on friday

and then the merge events now you're not in control of that that happens when it happens when the when the proof of work chain achieves a certain total difficulty that's the amount of work that's been done on the chain and um marius and perry kind of set the criteria for that at a certain value um and um with the understanding they were they would be the ones mining it um you know with cpu mining so it would take you know maybe five days four four five days to reach that terminal total difficulty meanwhile um somebody or somebody jumped on and started proof of work mining the the uh proved work chain with um gpus which

dramatically accelerates the difficulty right um wondering about you fizz did you only which which meant that the merge event was you know likely to be brought forward like by three four days might have happened saturday or sunday um and you know marius maris just needs a weekend off i mean it's just it's not a big deal um because there's so little mining being done on the proof of work chain is very sensitive if people bring more hash power on onto it so it can you know um change the the the timing dramatically on main net won't be an issue because there's so much hash power that you know people bring on a bit more is just a few few more percent

um so yeah it's just about saving marriages uh we didn't seem innocent because they apparently turned off their gpu so well now we've got the opposite problem so yeah um so they we very quickly um oh did an override on the terminal total difficulty by a factor of 20 uh to delay it into midweek this week um and that exposed uh some issues in clients um teku we botched the override facility so we fix that quickly um but anyways you can override the terminal total difficulty um and it's a sort of emergency provision in case you know um during the real merge event we need to do an emergency merge or we need to

delay or or something we can override the number so it was a good test of that and we failed but it's fixed now um but now the now the gpu miners dropped off um how would we do the you know it might take weeks reach us so this is this is what it really is so difficult to calculate because if you ask for help like hey if you have some gpus can you point them here and then you end up with you know 80 000 cards i know and you know this kind of thing with proof of work all these uncertain fork timings and things all that'll be gone post-merge we'll know exactly when things happen because we have this 12-second heartbeat which is wonderful um i do want to say that east

staker is planning to do a live launch call of that merge uh but the kiln test net merge very excited about that um our our attention has been scattered and we usually plan best based on a specific date so we're gonna try and pull this together which really means we're gonna try and get a poep together uh and get the right people in the right in the room at the right time uh but i'm hoping that'll be sometime wednesday and so just look at we'll be announcing that uh as soon as it's hard to announce we'll be announcing the plan to announce it as soon as we're able to yeah it'll be a sort of like a flash mob event you'll put out a tweet so right it's happening five minutes or

a gpu just dropped off it's gonna be another two hours i don't know i'll uh i'll join if i can uh we got a couple guides out here and i'm glad that you pointed out something about these guides um so remy roy and i did a walk through video guide of his merge test net which was great it's it's very easy to follow um terence did instructions for prism and geth accidental green detecu and geth and chris hobcroft um also did techyou and geth the thing that we're missing here is uh execution layer diversity uh and i'm glad you mentioned that um i'm i'm becoming more and more willing to uh just start testing with bayesiu as a default um it just it seems to make sense

yeah uh and i think now the mind is um is also up to it eragon have committed i think now to to being ready um uh for the merge so so looking good um we should have four consensus and four um execution clients sort of you know fully production ready um for for the event which will be a good number but yeah i guess it's so dominant um yeah basically is making good progress and obviously if you want to get involved there you can go to yeah i forgot to put that link in didn't i and that's and this is where you can see the total terminal difficulty change but uh yeah these links will get you

started as well as these walkthroughs to to back up you still have two days to be a part of the merge well if you're if your validator gets onboarded onto the beacon chain in time so if if you're seeing this monday you probably if you want to be a part of the merge you probably want to get your validator running as quickly as you can if you want to be a part of the merge yeah and it's post merger is also really important to test uh everything as well so you know there's certainly value in in waiting a while um we will get out a teku release in the next day or so uh with all of the um options you know minus minus network equals kiln and so

you don't have to do any messing about it's it's all um straightforward um and um yeah at the moment you have to build it yourself we use our sort of develop docker image but we'll we'll get a full release out and that will you know fully support um kiln configurations sure um and very exciting we have names now um the ethereum cat herder's named the execution layer um fork paris and the consensus layer fork is gonna be called bellatrix all right yeah so these are the sort of pre-merge upgrades on the execution side and the um consensus side so um you know we'll to make them fork aware as we discussed

you know just now um they they need upgrades and then the and then the merge event happens uh later um so it's a sort of third phase of that i'm really looking forward to seeing uh memes that incorporate paris and bellatrix like i don't know what that might look like but i just feel the potential in my gut i'm sure there's some geniuses out there who can come up with some good stuff um i am slacking so much on withdrawals like it's it seems so far away in my mind that i haven't really given it much attention uh what does alex's uh metaspec say uh yeah it just pulls things together i was funny bit hard to track all the different um bits popping up i'm super

happy that um alex stokes has kind of taken leadership on this uh you know things make progress when somebody just takes something and runs with it and owns it um and we've seen that time and time again it seems like alex has stepped up for withdrawals um so he's just brought together the various docs and and written a nice gloss on the on the flow um and the idea is that it will be initiated on the consensus layer um so if you're running a validator if you want to do a partial withdrawal of your running validator or you want to exit and do a full withdrawal of your of your whole stake and rewards uh that those will be options so you'll send a message on the

um consensus layer which will be similar to um a voluntary exit message uh it will specify um an eth1 address an ethereum address where you want your funds to go that will be dealt with on the consensus layer so they'll be um it will find its way it that a receipt will be issued when a node kind of acknowledges that you you want to do this withdrawal the receipts will find their way into beacon blocks uh the beacon mode will instruct the execution layer node uh the eth1 node to do the update to the balances so it sort of all hangs together and

will be initiated on the consensus side um very interesting yeah i i have been curious but i haven't uh delved into it so i appreciate you sharing that i'll need to read this today yeah there are sort of you know complexities in there but alex is uh kind of um uh making it all nice so yeah i learned i i went from uh zero to about 30 understanding there so i'm very happy with thank you kurtosis workshop a platform for doing development and testing distributed systems uh yeah this um this is nice this came out of the avalanche community i think they commissioned this ketosis company

to build tooling for them uh and now they these guys are going around sort of um shilling their wares to uh other blockchains and uh among them is um uh ethereum and eth2 and it is a framework for um spinning up complex test nets um there's a lot of sort of scripting in go required as i understand it but it's um useful for doing ci for client developers so in our continuous um i can't remember what the i stands for integration i believe integration that's the one thank you in our ci environments we can uh you know put a pull request in and then it will

spin up modes and check that nothing breaks um and uh so it's it's useful devops stuff yeah and this stuff looks good they've been very receptive our team's been talking to them they're making some changes as a result um it's been um uh it seems to be a good thing cool uh very exciting this is stuff i'm into lido uh very interesting yeah go ahead yeah well um what to say uh i i am intrigued by lydo's commitments to move to trustless staking i think this i mean i think it's a impressive but al also be

a necessity i mean they are so dominant um in staking um that's uh it's almost that they have to do this um and so i hadn't heard anything for a while so i i think this came out of our last chat actually uh fizz so we we discussed something like this and i thought i'll ping them and see what's um what's going on so got an update from izzy um and i the update is is kind of is coming but not soon um so they've made some steps in in in the direction of trying to diversify their node operator that's the no base um and some other bits and pieces but really it's sort of merged first

which is fair enough yeah and then then there are some quite big gaps between where they are and where they want to be in terms of of decentralized infrastructure so some will be filled with distributed validated technology and so on but that's not mature yet so it's a sort of bit of a holding reply but you know that's okay it's still on their minds they're still working towards it there are things going on they haven't forgotten about it and you know gone on and done something completely different i i do love this commitment to de-permissioning the registry um that that is it for me that is a big goal because if you have only permissioned operators then you're really a centralizing force but if if you have a fully de-permissioned uh

base of operators then you're really creating a decentralized network or promoting a decentralized platform so my struggle is like i want to see movement and not just language um and that's you know kind of one of the things you ask for something and you get well this is what we're going to do in the future um but i do i do align with lido and i believe that they are truly working toward these goals and also izzy uh i who i've known for a while as freeborn is is really committed to these goals um i'd just love to see them start happening and it's a hard problem i mean let's not um uh kill ourselves i mean you know

rocketpool took like three four years to kind of come up with their solution and and you know came into the beacon chain a year after it launched um so you know they've uh they've done a huge amount of work to achieve um something similar um so it is not an easy problem decentralization is hard but yeah i mean interestingly i was speaking with a colleague in russia um looking to emigrate can't take money with him uh crypto is the answer and he said to me you know he's been working on this stuff for years and he said you never thought he'd see the day when the technology became not just of technology

yeah yeah a necessity i mean a a game-changer for him so you know um decentralization theater um i you know i think his actual decentralization is is is becoming um a critical um thing for us we need to just keep pushing keep pushing keep pushing call out the centralizing factors and and deal with them i'm glad to hear you say that because sometimes i i you know say to myself dude shut up no one cares but but when it gets to the reality of of governments choosing to censor the chain if if we're not ready when that happens then we're wasting all of our time and i i don't believe we're wasting our time

yeah 100 um let's see oh so i did a how to stay and i i really did focus here on four uh four kind of scenarios solo staking is always the gold standard um if if you can't solo stake uh maybe you wanna be a mini pool operator on rocket pool um maybe you want to hold our ether if you can use metamask and if none of those things work then staking in custodial ways with your exchange is still valuable um and so people will wonder why did why did i choose rocket pool rather than something like lido or rather than some other platform and it is back to this

decentralization that rocket pull is um permissionless in their node operator so anyone can operate a node i stand by this and i i do think that i'm i'm guiding in the right direction yeah uh it's a great reminder that we we have a spectrum here it's not black and white there's there's a whole sort of gradient of um of good ways to do things yeah love it yeah not not not the ravings of a lunatic at all i have these thoughts when i was running the only thing about this that i really wanted to bring up is um i feel like we we should be seeding more education at lower levels so that we can later harvest that those rewards in in

our chain and by that i mean uh everyone seems to be hiring all the time but i don't see a lot of evidence of people paying for education so i really think that there's an opportunity for all of this wealth that's in ethereum to provide scholarship to provide quality education so that some of those people will come and later benefit what we're doing um uh shout out for consensus boot camp i'm i'm brandi today representing got my nice new uh nice new swags it's a nice one yeah um but yeah uh absolutely uh how is the east staker um

uh educational effort i forget what what you called it ethereum studymaster yeah it it's stalling um but it's still we consider it a valuable idea it just we probably need to get some more development effort and do it we still value it it just hasn't had hasn't received the effort it needs i wanted to bring up ethereum pools uh their public dashboard which i really value let me find the link to it okay absolutely um i love this idea um but one of the things that that kind of happened here is we know that the pool validators are led by coinbase

kraken and binance the thing that's missing here is is lido um yeah yeah and the reason lido is missing do you want to say do you want me to say it uh well is it because it's been broken down into the separate node operators yeah who and and as is he said there are like 20 something of them yeah it was because of i i sort of pushed for no service provider to have greater than 20 um and so uh the the response to that was rather than hey lighter let's work together at less than 20 it was to disaggregate them by individual operators so that it no longer appears that lido has 20 percent

there's there's some sense to that i mean i've had this conversation with with lido people um you know they don't dictate what their operators use um in terms of um you know client or or anything about their infrastructure um you know they they they facilitate and and the operators are independent they run in their own data centers or their own networks and so on so so it's not yeah it's not as simple as saying oh this is all centralized around lydo or it's all decentralized around the the individuals it's um somewhere in the middle so you could you could argue it both ways i acknowledge that i i just i think the important thing is as we're

pursuing decentralization that we're not purposely turning a blind eye to anything and saying well this is exempt because we don't want to to deal with it our responsibility really is to root out decentralization and not to turn a blind eye to it but i i also i get i get the need to or the desire to uh regard them differently let's see i had this over here i love jim um yeah so he's um a testament is in a really interesting position so uh for

those who don't know very early on pre before beacon chain launch they wrote or jim wrote their own um validator technology which is not as hard as you might think because actually almost 98 of the work is in the beacon node the validator is a really simple entity just basically signs off on you know gets duties and then when it's time comes it it signs its duties validators simple so what they do at a testant is they run all the beacon nodes and they have a validator uh node which um interrogates each of your beacon nodes so when it's time to propose a block they get a block from each of the beacon nodes and then they can evaluate which

beacon node gave us the best block best being defined as the one which will earn us the the greatest rewards and they're in a sort of almost unique position to evaluate this they've got the very nice comparative data um and uh yeah it's a great article so very nice write-up so vouch is that is their um the thing that i love about this is that um and i struggled with it at first that they don't acknowledge uh which beacon chain represents which node and at first that is unnerving um until at least from my perspective our goal is to use

all of the beacon chain nodes all of the validator clients and not just to pick one that we think is the best and run with that um and so the overall picture here is they all work well uh and you're not going to lose by choosing any of the uh the validator clients you'll you'll win even better if you choose vouch well that's that's the interesting thing if you've got the capacity to run multiple beacon nodes then this is a way to um to leverage that to improve your uh your income so that's uh that's interesting i i know which one of the notes is one of them is teku and i know which one is it is because jim told me but uh um i'm not going to spill the

beans here one thing one caveat which i noted in in the uh newsletter is that this is based on prada testnet which is there are a lot of skipped blocks on prada test net which makes it quite dissimilar from uh the beacon chain itself at the moment where there are barely any skip skip blocks and jim has found that the distribution and relative performance of the clients is dramatically different on on the actual beacon chain so i i believe he's right writing that up now um and uh we should see some interesting different differences i've i've been trying uh to get east staker and and attestants together to

do a demo of vouch because i'll confess that i wanted to install it but i was like i don't get all of this stuff um the configuration files were a little confusing for me no they weren't a little confusing i couldn't do it um so i was like we'll just get a test into demo and then i can i can learn how to install it because uh you know the big takeaway here is running all of the beacon chains is more valuable than running any of the individuals by themselves so hopefully that will work out at some point block builder separation is kind of a very important thing it's it's yeah yeah and i wonder if a lot of

people are sleeping on this um yeah uh i've been talking to jim and others for a while uh around this so the the issue is that um post merge is very likely that uh all blocks will be built by flashbots i mean i'm putting it very starkly yeah and so validators will say to flashbacks give me a block and then we'll propose that that block the reason for that is basically because flashbots are in a position to build the most valuable uh they get the juicy mev could be a very significant fraction of income for validators

what what do alternatives look like um you know i could build my own blocks locally because that will still work there'll be a mempool and i can assemble stuff from that but i i'm not in a position to extract that mev i will i will be missing out on income and maybe i'm cool with that maybe i think mev is you know morally indefensible or something and i'm okay getting lower income that's but i imagine my fellow validators i won't be i'll be proposing my own blocks just because of the decentralization aspect and that that it's a it's a service i believe but anyway yeah the there is that and you know some people might take a kind of moral view on that and say uh uh do that but basically it becomes as otherwise becomes a centralizing vector

because if for example coinbase who do have the resources to extract mev are able to make more valuable blocks then their uh income rate on coinbase will go up compared to what i can get as a solo validator and so i i'll go to the centralized big operators that that's the problem um the flashbots is a solution to this they'll hand out blocks to anyone who asks so but the the danger is they then become a centralizing factor so a single point of failure a potential point of censorship on the network and today they might be all friendly and trustworthy and you know we believe they're a net benefit but you know tomorrow they

could go rogue who knows um so this this is worrying better to have three four ten block builders on the network you can go to and you can choose choose your best blog or you may have reasons trust one entity more than another or want to be uh promote diversity so i'm you know i've put cars on table i'm talking to infuria about being a block builder um okay if you're in a good position to do this i'm pushing yes they are because they're going to lose all of that uh execution layer traffic they've got another opportunity that's yeah i mean they won't necessarily lose lose traffic but if because the mempool

will will still be there anymore but i'm saying we're not losing a a service to provide i guess right right so you know infuriate sees a lot of um transactions a good fraction of transactions before anyone else on the network they're in a good position build valuable blocks and you know for me this is a win-win i mean it's a win because it diversifies the block producers on the network so you know we've got backup we've got alternatives which is good um and it's also good for my company so the ultimate solution to this problem is pbs is that correct so you can do this in protocol um so

this is an outside protocol kind of hacked together approach that doesn't require changing the the spec at all uh that's what we're going with currently because nobody's got bandwidth with merge going on to do anything more um more um robust yeah there are some proposals to build this in protocols you can have an in protocol auction which is trustless for blocks between block producers and that's quite a way off i think um at this time and hasn't been fully fully fleshed out requires some quite big changes and it doesn't solve the problem but economically

there's likely to be one dominant player you know the one who produces best blocks everyone will want to use their and everyone else will just drop out because they're not selling any blocks okay so i i was looking at that article for a sec um did you say flashbots will not solve the problem or that uh pbs will not solve the problem doing the um pbs proposal build a split in protocol doesn't solve the economic the crypto economic problem which is uh you it will tend towards being one dominant player who who produces um uh the best blocks interesting so if nothing else this is a a big a big thing for all of us to begin just kind of mulling about and

kind of um keep in mind for the future decentralization of the chain yeah yeah we'll see how it plays out interesting elias i saw this but it was elias has done doing some nice interviews and write-ups on various uh various folk he kindly did one of me a little while ago which is which is fun um and uh yeah good nice in-depth uh long in-depth interviews um so this is luke youngblood of coinbase as i note in in what's new um coinbase he he is important uh coinbase runs so many validators that decisions that luke is making

are very significant for for the chain um you know it's good to know what his instincts are and what his view of of where things are going and how things should run uh uh awesome um i've never heard of the the conjure test now yeah i it's been a bit stealth mode um just uh to note that um this is working on in the execution layer on moving towards statelessness so we have to move to diff using different data structures inside the evm um basically something called vocal trees instead of the merkel patricia tri that it currently has um i wasn't aware but guillaume has been

quietly working away implementing this in geth and doing proof concepts and he's running a little test note so um i'm so terrible here because i i'm like i'm like yeah but can i mine it sorry i can't talk i skipped this and i was gonna let it go but i decided i would like to go back and catch it um amy caster talks about move to proof of stake in in mit's technology review yeah we're going mainstream is that oh i haven't read this oh it's a listener also any takeaway from it oh nothing that will surprise you um and it's mostly accurate only a couple of things around the date but you can't

really fault journalists for that because uh things change all the time so it's um it's pretty good it's nice to see some reasonably accurate there's a bit of you know jeopardy inserted at the end but it's all just standard journalistic stuff uh and basically a decent account of what we're doing i think if if we do this 60 hours a week and we have trouble keeping up then it's hard to fault anyone else it could could uh eat implementers i i really thought i was the only one that got cut off from that and i was like well i guess i'm screwed and it turns out that none of us got it um but you were there i was there taking notes as usual um so yeah uh thankfully we have a record for

posterity of all the all the banter on the uh on the chat i mean nothing much report um uh on that i mean people can plow through that if they're interested check all the gm's real fast oh prism incorrect uh alcor devs was fourth of march and i haven't seen this at all uh did i miss anything it's so i don't know at some stage we'll we'll probably have to merge these calls in in into one so um because we're all called devs now um uh so a lot of talk on um execution sides um a lot of bike shedding about

heads safe head finalized head i mean let's we haven't really got time to go into the gory details now save that for next time yeah one of my favorite things about any of these calls is there's so much focus on shanghai already which to it and that should have been in my uh in my post up there the fact that we are are now focused on implementing shanghai is a an excellent indication that uh bellatrix or that their merge is pretty much locked up yeah yeah devs have got nothing to do on the merge we've done our work it's um more testbets notes yeah yeah um lighthouse is updated nimbus is updated you can see i'm sort of

yeah i'm running out of time at this point and i just kind of bung everything in bullet points now so yeah um ethereum academic grand strong that's a big deal for anybody who has academic ability and wants to be recognized for it it's also a great like foot in the door with the ef um yeah we talked about the different approaches to academia um a while back and you know we some are sort of uh just trying to catch us out and some are very collaborative um and uh i'm definitely in favor of good strong links with academia i think you know we can benefit and they can benefit this is some really really fascinating topics to you know set the big brains on

yeah i've really thought about uh connecting with my local university to encourage them to promote blockchain education but so far everything i know about my local university tells me that they uh have a very outdated view of what we're doing so i live in a small town um and so obalk proto community is live uh great for them big announcements yeah yep so distributed validator technology is coming so ssv you're building it and overall building it's taking quite different approaches um to bootstrapping this but uh uh yeah yeah what can i say i i'd say i'm i'm watching but i i just i'm not obsessed yet uh it may happen at some

point yeah we have a standard now um to to work to implement so i think things will will accelerate yeah yeah uh i found this very amusing i don't and i i was i wanted to say something snarky like um what happens if you collaborate i don't know just [Laughter] yeah i don't collaborate that's a problem i spent the last 25 years of my career trying to maneuver myself into a position where i don't have to collaborate with anyone and i finally got there you're not going back now and kelvin rugs me oh i found that amusing um it's good that we'll have two different perspectives on um on the chain and maybe at late one night

when you've had a little a little too much wine you could go look at his and he could look at yours and you could be like oh i should have added that yeah we'll see um yeah i mean i'm on good terms with kelvin i'll uh i'll give him a call and uh we'll chat about what's best but uh so he and i did a little bit of work on on this eth2 book like two and a half years ago um consensus was funding him among others and uh kelvin was working on it full-time and you know i had access to his repo and stuff and did some reviews and uh editorial stuff but um i i really when i you know i had this itch to to write this thing and i was quite jealous of him but i left it uh for two years

and i when he started with optimism and uh then i looked at his repo and he'd kind of hadn't done anything for two years on on it i thought okay coaster's clear it's time uh let's dive in um from the historical perspective though it's so much more valuable to have two different views of the same kind of thing then you can it gives that 3d depth to it at least that's how i feel yeah let let's see how it goes he's taking a very different approach he's starting with the breakfast um and kind of building down and i'm doing very much depth first so i'm kind of finishing a topic and you know when i put it out there so um bls signatures will be going out today or

tomorrow um that's everything i know on it i've done everything and i'm you know uh consider it basically complete subject to just maybe some minor revisions so i'm building it out kind of horizontally and you know a deep chunk of the time which is why it looks like it's taking forever um whereas yeah kelvin's kind of gone shallow and broad and then we'll be working down i'm very eager to read uh i know where yours is and i i've read some sections but i'm very eager to read more but it's on that list of like these are the 840 things that i want to get done today and oh and my family wants to go to the park it's there it's a reference for people

who who you know want who are working on this stuff um and you know really need to look up something and you know just to be able to find out the uh the background and whatever you know any anyone who sits and reads it from cover to cover when it when that's possible is going to be quite mad so i just looked at the time because uh we had you and i had talked about the time before like how long should it take and we agreed it would just be a walk through and we would not look at the clock an hour and seven minutes is not bad at all uh yeah it's probably a bit shorter we started late but um my fault um but uh we uh that's right we had the uh the timing confusion it might be right at an hour

30 minutes at 2x speed is not too bad it's great i love the articles um let's all remember that uh wednesday is the plan for the kiln merge um and depending on what time it is um depending what time zone everyone is in i look forward to joining everyone for that uh exciting event and don't forget to make some donations at grants around 13 on git coin good stuff all right thanks that was fun thank you bye ben i just have to remember uh how to bye bye everyone