What's new in Eth2 - 15 July 2022 with Ben Edgington and superphiz

Transcript

hey everyone i'm superfiz from the eatstaker community and i'm here with my dear friend ben edgington hey fez nice to talk to you again um yeah as i was just saying it's nearing 100 of your fahrenheit's here which is getting up towards 40 degrees so i'm melting a little bit we're not we're not built for this in in britain but uh yeah so if you see beads of sweat on my brow this is this is why then i'll know you're working hard that's right yeah it's good yeah because you're giving me such a hard time as usual so ben and i get together fortnightly to discuss his what's new in eth2 newsletter um and i i continue to get a lot of pushback about eth2 and in this

context eth2 essentially means um unimplemented research in ethereum uh it is not a different token a different chain it is it is ben's choice to uh develop his newsletter in using a term that describes unimplemented research would you say that future it's the future of ethereum uh and it begins it begins with emerge but it goes way beyond that to my mind and uh yeah i mean i've been writing this newsletter for four years under that name i'm not going to change it now so people just have to live with it um i'm i'm now uh i'm okay with it and i'm like embracing it supporting it so um i'm glad to have glad to have you writing it

so let me switch to newsletter view how do i do this uh i rarely have to run my own stuff and then i forget how to do it okay this year yes all right um so ben and i um ben is a developer for teku he's also someone who who does a great job of keeping like the broad picture of what's going on in ethereum um and i'm a community member who's engaged in what's going on and i try to inform the community and try to kind of connect the developers with the people who aren't developers and i do that a lot through easttaker um this newsletter turns out to be a great bridge for those two

things and so that's why we get together and just sort of chat about it did i do that right let's check i felt good about it yeah so we're doing uh what's new in eth2 for the 15th of july 2022 um and so that was actually uh the end of last week today it's july 18th so when you see this it's not three days old we're just talking about it today july 18th and gosh it feels like okay i have to acknowledge it is because of the merge date but it really feels like everything is just sort of coming together at one time do you get that is that the uh yeah uh well we've been waiting for this

for so long and people have been uh so resistant to putting a date uh even even an idea a general target of a date you know within plus or minus like three months or something uh that actually to have something out there however soft and squidgy the date may be uh however uncommitted to it we are the mere fact that we've said you know publicly uh here is a possible target date for um delivering this merge that we've been waiting for for six seven years now um is extraordinary and yeah it really focuses minds because it's not very far away it's so interesting to frame it that way i'm finally at the point where if we don't hit like september um if if we don't merge this

in september which i believe that we will that's going to be the time that i'm ready to say the merge has been delayed because prior to this it has all been speculation um it has all been putting parts together and now that we have kind of like a tentative timeline um now it's time to say if we miss those dates um then you know certainly i don't want people to panic but it is it is a suggestion that's that we would have been delayed for some uh some causal reason um something that i didn't want people to pull out of the bag early and say you know well you didn't do it in may so you've been delayed yeah yeah i mean it gets a bit into technicalities doesn't it what was really a delay and you know technically

we've never announced a date so technically we're not delayed but um i kind of side with evan vanessa a little on this that's you know that's that's just kind of uh sovereignty play with words really yeah we'd all hoped to deliver this thing much earlier so yeah whether we've said it or not well i i guess evan has decided that he's going to do a user activated soft fork if the developers don't so one way or the other the merge is going to happen right it's happening so let's let's get into this i that's like the second time i've used uh anthony sessano's words um so ama number eight uh was this week yeah

i haven't fully digested it uh to be honest uh i've read through some of the the top topics the the sort of character of these has changed a bit over the uh few years that they've been doing them but uh yeah very much enjoying seeing um the answers we haven't heard from justin drake for a while so you could see that he's uh um bob the sponge one is still still around and still engaged um and there's some really good questions and thoughtful answers so uh yeah it's a treasure trove if you want to see where we're going with the protocol post merch there's there's a lot of good stuff in there yeah what is your interpretation that like

you say the character of it has changed what uh what do you mean it seems to be just a bit more sort of thoughtful and long form than it used to be um and maybe i'm sort of miss mischaracterizing or misremembering it see there's more sort of focus to it and less noise um yeah it looks like now so uh these are good sessions i i loved that uh danny justin and vitalik all kind of for many of these questions gave their own nuanced perspective um and it would be so easy for them to sit behind closed doors and say this is going to be our party line

but instead they independently shared their perspectives and well i don't think they clashed they did uh they did show different different research perspectives and i i thought that was just really cool to see yeah yeah and that that's great i mean that's really important isn't it i mean i think it shows that the ethereum foundation isn't a um dictatorship but it's independent researchers who kind of come under this banner and they have different viewpoints and and we thrash it out you know what the future looks like and that's the ethereum way and not to go under that too long but that is um so my favorite thing about vitalik is that he does not want to own ethereum that he

very willingly encourages and promotes other people to step up to those leadership roles and like i that's i don't know it just impresses me so much for such a for a young person to have that much awareness of like the right role it's just very cool yeah yeah totally and again super important for ethereum not to have you know one single point of failure one person who generates all the ideas and dictates the direction uh we're a long way from that now there are you know there's a number of big brains who you know contribute very actively to the whole the whole thing and uh if one of them goes off and does something completely different you know we we trundle on we keep on chugging yeah yeah um what is this finally uttered a

potential merge date in public yeah in case you missed it september 19th so this came out of the week i have to say the week of i'm sorry right right right yeah um this came out of the consensus devs call on um last uh yes a footnote at the bottom that's right sorry september 2022 yeah that was buddha's comment uh tim didn't say a year um so this came out a consensus devs call on thursday last week um we had agreed on the last all-court death school we'd set a um ttd terminal total difficulty which is a target date for the gurley network

merge and potentially for mainnet um merge on that call and the call progressed uh on thursday and um a date was not mentioned we didn't get around to the girly ttd and then danny jumped in and said hmm and i i actually at that moment i had my finger on the unmute button to to jump in and say exactly the same thing so very pleased that danny got there first but um that held tim's feet to the fire a bit in terms of actually committing to to something so i and you know i was happy with the way that the the conversation went so [Music]

we're juggling a number of things we've got to get the the gurley network merge done uh that's got to go well uh we've got to leave enough time after that be sure that it's working before mainnet uh gets um merged and you know their various processes in terms of updates setting ttd's um uh for the networks and and so on that's that we need to do i haven't enumerated everything uh here what are you looking for i was looking for your uh your notes from the call i was going to scroll to that timeline but yeah it didn't go where i thought it would uh yeah if you go further down you there are links to uh under keep going down

is towards the end and then i've got the regular calls section and you should be able to oh you mean all the way down to the notes yeah yeah yeah right through that's from tim keep going keep going keep going yep yeah okay sorry that's what i was looking for yeah so these were taken at the time as the meeting was in progress so uh not uh they're a bit uh terse and uh don't capture the full conversation but um yeah so we do client releases uh within the next week or so for um uh gurley and prata networks so we a ttd has been chosen today for for um that network merge

so we're taking the prata test note which already exists on the beacon chain and we're taking the girly test net which is sort of proof of authority network not proof of work and we're going to merge those that's the next step so there will be announcements of the client availability that everything's ready and we're good to go uh towards the end of the month 28th 29th um these dates are slightly changed uh i think on reconsideration so i think we're looking to do the bellatrix update on prata around the 4th of august now targeting that uh if i recall correctly so that just prepares the beacon chain side for the merge so it's basically you know a hard fork

of the beacon chain and then about a week later around the 10th or 11th for ttd we expect the ttd to be reached um targeting between 9th and 11th of august so that's the girly network and that that's a sort of balance between client teams being ready uh i think all the consensus teams you know feel very ready but on the execution side nevermind we're kind of asking for a little bit longer uh on the call and and so on so i think they're feeling uh like yeah we need to sort of do girly merge as late as possible without moving the mainnet merge too late because otherwise we get into devcon and all that so so yeah so there's sort of a balance uh

here of of timing uh and then yeah assuming that goes well we won't hang around and wait for the next awkward death call we'll call an irregular one immediately and say okay which does not happen that's exciting yeah i mean it seems pointless to delay the merge by two weeks just because you know we're not in the right in sync with the awkward devs call next so this is crazy so i'm sure we can get people uh together um they have been done weekly in the past ahead of um big um big upgrades and things yeah so yeah no it's not not unprecedented i i'm excited that we have an actual ttd for gurley um i think it was was girly cheddar was it the

the like was that the aged hardest age so that's pretty firm uh and releasing a ttd makes it um we're in parmesan territory yeah i don't know ungraded i guess that is a very okay i'm i'm just looking for concrete let me give me some concrete cheese so yeah that's it's all very exciting i know this is the news uh it's obviously the news the markets have been waiting for because the markets woke up um and yeah you think there's a link i mean i i love these headlines that say you know uh eath price up as merge date said that you know it's not neces they're not saying merge date caused it but they're drawing a kind of correlation between the two i don't know

maybe it is i i don't know really it's up against btc right i feel strongly um and uh you're right so we have this whole like uh does the price drive the narrative or does the narrative drive the price um but i feel very again it's just my gut feeling that this news is is kind of it kind of puts everything into gear where people who may have been on the sidelines are now saying i don't want to miss my chance to be in on eth before the merge because i don't want to get left behind so we'll see right we'll see we'll see imagine i don't want to say i don't want to put a negative spin on this but imagine it being successful like

yeah that's that's all that i imagine and then it will come true yeah yeah uh sepolia is quite interesting yeah uh so that was the last test that we merged this is a little while ago now uh two weeks ago um and uh yeah i mean you were there you're on the call anthony cesano was hosting this time it was a much shorter call than the um roxton one which was a relief i have to say and because the timing i mean so you know there there was a lot of work done in the background to kind of manipulate the hash rate on simpolia to get us to ttd around the right time and incredibly i only realized this after the event it was hit within 24 seconds of the stated

target which is extraordinary wildly impressive yeah i think it's some genius hashrate tuning going on by the ethereum foundation team uh there so uh yeah and um so i i always feel i've said this before i think is that i always feel a bit deflated with these these things because we sit around and what we you want to kind of say it's it's happened and we're all cheering we're popping the champagne and you know it's it's all brilliant um but it's not like that because there isn't really we have to wait for finality to be sure it's happened and even then there's always something like there's some missing blocks or there's some drop in the participation rate or there's something weird going on we need to investigate um

and it may be fine it may be not fine and it's kind of hard to tell so there's always this kind of feeling that well i don't know if we should celebrate or not celebrate which is a bit weird uh on this case we saw on sepolia network participation dropped to about seventy percent so we lost so five percent of the network was offline any well there weren't any validators the keys have been generated but they're somewhere they've been lost on the way i don't know what the story is there but so 95 participation was was the maximum we could expect so about 25 percent of the network did not make it through the merge event so participation dropped about 70 which is enough to finalize but yeah you know

we're missing um you know a quarter of the blocks uh on the network which is not great still making progress but you know not running at full capacity uh and it turned out to be the the entire 25 of missing validators turned out to be due to user error uh in configuring them by by client teams and other professionals by and large which is embarrassing right you know i don't want to think of it as embarrassing it is it's a testament to how complicated it can be like these are people who know how to run the clients um and over i guess it's a double override for that ttd it it's good that uh everyone recognizes the complexity of

that ttd override because it's something needs to be engineered away i guess yeah yeah that's definitely worth stating that's there there's been a different process on these proofwork test nets than than there will be for mainnet and it's a more complex process because the hash rate on these test nets is very low because it's they're just not worth mining there's nothing to gain uh so because it's very low it's very easy to manipulate so we had a situation on rockstar where a miner um brought the uh reached that made the network reach ttd before the bellatrix 4 could had happened which is um uh pointless really everything breaks in that situation can never happen on mainnet the hatch rate on mainnet is so

huge that uh there just is not enough hash power in the world to manipulate the uh approach to dtd like that so we can simplify the mainnet thing and we are we've talked long we've talked at length about how how we can make the user experiences under the circumstances as simple as possible whilst trying to be as safe as possible for the network uh and i think we've we agreed an approach at the last uh call devs meeting yeah i i uh have wondered will we see minor shenanigans for mainnet and my theory is that the number of people with drawing hash will equal the number of people adding hash and it

will look pretty consistent um but yeah yeah it should be you should be should be economically motivated right you know um you know if miners leave other miners come and and uh take their place because the rewards you know go go up proportionately i don't know how much you follow mining but i think a six gig dag is about to be outdated isn't that about that uh is it five gigs six gig i i can't remember but yes um that's right a bunch of very old kits may drop off uh there have been some estimates of how much it might be something like 10 of hash rate or something like that but uh yeah uh i'm not in the detail on that but i'm aware something is is is a foot yeah i guess i'll look at that later but

very interesting uh so yes so glad to get some pulley out thank you uh anthony cesano for hosting yeah yeah and we just oh god are you you first well just to close that one off um after the everybody came back from uh the um misconfigurations uh everything's been fine it's been running very smoothly so that's it the thing that i need to say is this uh should inform us for both girly and mainnet um that the call that we host is a community celebration it is we've come this far um let's let's celebrate when we pass when we hit ttd and transfer to uh proof of stake but let's not draw

conclusions from that event because um we really won't know for several hours and potentially even till the next day how successful we are um yeah yeah that's what beacon chain will go down no they're a fantastic product but the explorers will go down reporting will fail and so it's so impossible to tell in the fog of war what's working and what isn't yeah we need better tools um yeah beacon chain's fabulous but it does have a bit of a track record on on the merge stuff i think as uh ef have been sort of self-hosting it and haven't provisioned it's uh uh quite uh enough but um the and it and it is a good reminder fizz that i've been seeing again the

last couple of weeks you know people saying oh you know we need to be in a position where the merge is flawless uh and and that is just not the case i mean the chain is designed uh to be resilient it is designed to degrade um gracefully and uh you know subject to not losing even if we lose more than 33 percent of the nodes uh as long as they're back online in a few hours you know nothing um nothing serious will happen the chain might be um unavailable for a a little while but it should still make progress people and decide what they want to do about finality but you know it doesn't need to be flawless um even losing 20 of the nodes would be a success it would be

absolutely fine is it is it you who's been saying that if if we wait to merge until it's flawless that we've waited too long is that your question that's not not from me but i i definitely endorse that view yeah um let's see uh maynard shadowforks now those have been having some hiccups uh yeah so they've been chugging along in the background uh shadowfall eight went very well so nothing to report there shadow fault nine had a bunch of issues that um parry recounted on the consensus call um yeah just just a sort of bunch of things coming together which is sort of being fixed and once they're

fixed the the network recovered i i don't know what to say about that really i'm not sure what lessons learned um parry said uh he's learned not to mess up the configuration i love that uh so perry perry gets everything right like he is he's a master and so when you see the master make you know a goof up you're like oh well he's he's human too so i appreciate all that he has done for the dev ops that's it's really impressive what he's what he brings absolutely um but other other issues were you know climb bugs of different swords which are not specifically merge related but were things which the merge

exacerbates so they're sort of latent client issues betsy's had a uh an issue for months now about occasionally very occasionally having a concurrency issue that um makes the state invalid so um it corrupts your your database uh fundamentally and you know it seems that never mind has had a similar issue around caching states and these things have been in the clients presumably for a long time um but there's something about the way that the merge works so when you switch to having the consensus layer client driving the execution client it's not used to being driven and it's being told to do things it doesn't normally do like you know switch from this wall to this fork uh evaluate this block and this will evaluate that block on the other

fork um and it wouldn't normally have to go through these gymnastics and this is revealing things like it seems like never mind had a cash cashing cash invalidation issue or something which uh was um surfaced more frequently by being in this merge configuration so it's normal part and parcel of debugging nodes and things uh and you know it's good these issues are showing up on the test notes they can be fixed and and hopefully the we'll see the early emoji go go sweetly yeah uh you know my takeaway from um nethermind aragon and baesu is i am not quite ready to stand on the mountaintops and say we need

full client diversity for execution layer yet um i i do look forward to that in the future personally i'm not ready for that yet but what we really do need are are people who have the skill to monitor and the ability to to run those nodes and and keep them included in the network there does need to be a strong representation um because we have to acknowledge as hardened as geth is if geth experiences a fault we do need uh those backup clients to maintain the network um and so that's that's a very important and valuable responsibility yeah yeah absolutely um i am looking

forward to spinning up my basic note but i'm just sort of hanging fire for a couple more weeks just to give them a chance to sort out some lingering issues they've um got some thing around sinking and peer scoring and um this database corruption thing is is a bit smelly so just hanging fire for a couple of weeks and i'll crank crank up with basically hopefully it'll be good do you do you plan to merge your your home nodes with feisu is that yeah that that's the that's a plan i i can hardly do otherwise but if uh um but you know if i'm not confident that it's going to be fully reliable by by the merge then i'll i'll fall back to

something else but um uh yeah you know i think it's i don't i don't this is just fizz's opinion but i think it's okay for some people to take that risk and say i may go offline there's a higher likelihood i'll go offline at the merge if i'm running one of these other clients but um it's also hedging the bet that if geth goes offline then they might be the ones who carry the network so like they're we do need to have people who are able to take that risk it's not a significant risk in the at the end of the day right uh yeah i mean it's the usual downtime thing you know if you're offline for a bit you you suffer some penalties you're not going to get slashed um you know uh

you can be back up and running it's a bit harder to get uh back up and running if you're just running a consensus client then you can do a checkpoint sync and be running again in a few minutes but uh if you have to resync your whole uh eth1 node then that's going to be a bigger challenge but yeah this gets me back to wanting to configure dirk and vouch like um i i just i haven't and it's it's crazy because if anybody should like me as some like i represent you know all of those for the community like i ought to have dirk and vouch configured um but the fact that i haven't is kind of a suggestion it's a little still out of reach for um mere mortals but

yep yeah so vouch is um about validator redundancy but also optimizing the um the rewards so you basically multiplex your uh clients so that you can choose the one that gives the best block or best attestation in any circumstance and dirk is the distributed key management right um that's right yes um and i i pair them together because jim pairs them together but i think that vouch is really all i would need to set up i just haven't made a priority yeah if you got the hardware for it um and the bandwidth for it then you know and the time to kind of set it up and manage it this this is a great solution um i did see some interesting set i i so

somebody sent me um a comparison between a staking operation that's using vouch and staking operations using just teku and the one using vouch was able to get 0.1 higher rewards overall so 1 000th which surprised me actually i thought it would be more than that advantage um and you know they've got all the clients running and they're picking the best blocking stations so yeah so you know putting my product manager hat on i'm super happy but of course you get the advantage of of the redundancy so if one fails if one has a consensus bug uh then you've got

the full back to the others and vouch will handle that for you and i i do think that is uh while it's definitely a low a low likelihood risk it is the thing that we need to be most prepared for um that one of the clients is especially one of the larger clients uh will experience some kind of consensus bug but yeah i think we'll be fine uh mev boost needs to be yeah yeah yeah yeah it's the thing whether you like it or not um and there's some more materials on this i'll stick something in the next uh issue flashboxes put out some more guides to configuring it so bottom line is um

after the merge validators like yourself and myself will be block builders um and we can choose to extract mev or not and it's pretty much a given that the big operators you know lido and um coinbase and all the rest will um subscribe to to mev so they'll take advantage of the ability to order transactions in the block to to uh eke out extra value which might be front running or it might be more benign things like arbitrage across exchanges or volt liquidation or whatever it may be there are many different kinds of mev in order to democratize it so that if

only the big boys are doing it then then you know you and i are at a severe disadvantage um and it's yeah it just becomes another centralizing force on the network in order to democratize these flashbox has this architecture whereby block builders who are not us who are separate order the transactions gain mev you know communicate with seekers and uh and then offer us a block and we can say okay i'll accept that block and it's got this much extra value uh we sign off on it and then it gets published to the network so that says mev boost architecture you have to run a sort of local sidecar to your validator which talks through a relay which you

know you have to register your node with it and and so on so if you want access to mev rewards post merge uh this is this is probably going to become the the main way to do it yeah and i think we all recognize uh while it is opt-in uh it will be very popular um it is this i i'm it's funny because i want to describe it in a way that uh will just give other people an opportunity to poke holes in it so i'm not gonna do that i i will say the fact that we are having to deal with mev is not my favorite thing but i am happy that it's being handled uh in a way that that most democratizes the network so

yeah and i hope it works out eventually that we have a number of block builders on the network i mean i think a very bad situation is if flashbots becomes the only block builder on the network because then it's a single point of failure and it's also a censorship point so in an ideal world we have multiple block builders and validators can choose according to their own criteria which one and you may choose to use a block builder who only uses fair ordering or or a block builder that returns some of the mev to users so that you know when i do a big swap on on uni uh uniswap um then uh you know the searcher might be able to extract value by sandwich attacking me but the block uh builder

might return some of that value to to me and you know we might share it with the searcher uh or something like that there will be all sorts of interesting options out there i i hope i hope we get this big ecosystem of a block builders with different approaches and we can we can choose according to our own sort of moral compass and concerns about what we do yeah it's definitely an opportunity for or a growth opportunity for eth that i really hope uh we lean into and come out better for in the end so we'll see right we'll see um let's see it's oh i have to click this one i can't help it

it's my favorite ron paul and so i what i what i want now is a a gif of ron paul being confused and it says is it happening sorry so yeah i this one of my games really i started a a github repo just encouraging people to put organized resources here because the media will be looking for ways to interpret the merge if we don't give them something then they will find some crazy youtuber to quote uh and so it's it's better that uh we offer them resources um and yeah if you do contribute to this you'll get a gitpo app so how do you feel it's going oh it's fine you know i i don't have um

i don't have wild expectations for it it's as much as the community wants to contribute is as good as it will be uh and so i've learned not to um you know uh hang my hand or like uh put my heart into something and hope it it goes big like if if it happens it's great and if it if it gets um washed aside then a lot of people will still get get get co-apps i can't even say this um so yeah it's it's going to win no matter what yeah this is great love it infuria's series of workshops on all aspects of the merge i yeah this is this is great um it's uh

i don't know what to say they've got a whole plan you can uh click on something probably that that series of workshops and it will give you the um the list of what's happening uh there we go there's the agenda uh so uh tomorrow july 19th solo stakers forum uh what you need to do to get ready so this all came out of the fact that a lot of people like myself are are plugging their um validator into infuriaso and using an e1 node hosted at infuria and yeah we went through weeks months of discussion about whether post merge infuriat offers the engine api and so on and yeah we talked to the ethereum foundation about it and and it eventually just took a view that this

this wasn't the right direction of travel that we need to push back on validators and encourage them to run their own nodes even if it's contrary to kind of if you're a sort of stated business model so coming out of that is this series of sessions and workshops on uh just equipping you know all aspects of the community on on what to expect for the merge uh which is great i i love it i haven't been involved in planning or um you know uh prepping this at all um i may appear on one at some point but it was on accident [Laughter] i love the service that infured provides but what i love more than that is seeing uh developers implementers and researchers and private industry leading

into decentralization and saying um you know while it's an easy service it's not a decentralized service so let's let's lean toward the centralization so i love to see that yeah uh you know imperial comes in for a lot of criticism but they're good people uh they have good instincts and uh you know i i'm this is uh my kind of view from the inside as it were i would say anybody who criticizes infuria is not acknowledging the benefit they've derived from infira so let's see uh remy roy and eric yorick um did a video about um what resource or what a solo staker's

gonna need to do after the merge i always love these guys they are so bright uh and share so well yeah yeah good sessions i haven't seen the merge oh phil okay so this is going to be an awesome resource getting load star up for the merge and do you have thoughts about um this in general about lodestar the merge yeah it's interesting if you visit the if you visit the ethereum foundation launchpad um loadstar is still not listed as one of the four consensus clients there i i'm not sure what the thinking is there i think the load star people view load star as a full production validator client um and would like to

see greater adoption and you know it's five production clients is better than four um but do we know is there a pr to actually add it i we should check on that like um because at least if you submit a pr like either it gets ignored it gets approved or gets denied like at least then it's not so nebulous yeah um i'm curious maybe they're like well you know we would have done it but nobody submitted a pr so yeah i don't know the answer um what because i i've been in the same kind of limbo like watching lodestar become more and more um prepared uh and still uh i've been saying i'm not ready to promote them publicly until they're

included on that launchpad but by other metrics by other appearances they do look ready so yeah i mean i think for a long time their messaging was we want to be the kind of um in-browser toolkit for doing like client stuff doing um libraries that enable people to write applications around eth2 stuff um we're not really aiming to be a production client and so for a couple of years that was the the narrative around load star and they you know talking to the guys there they there seems to be a bit of a pivot more recently that actually that they're now we want to play in the um production validator space um not sure what the background to that is

but um yeah they've got to sort of do do a bit more marketing to change mindset around that i think well it's interesting you say marketing because uh you know there are people like me who probably ought to be marketing them if they are a full fetch client but i'm also uh you know sort of holding back until i see other signals so it yeah yeah i don't know we'll get there yes i love bitfly beacon chain um this merge checklist is fantastic yeah that's a look to me that's a picture of it okay so i know that um yeah this is a great uh just kind of keep up with where you're at

yeah need lots of this just constant reminders uh there's a whole bunch of stuff to be done before the merge yeah the more people that put that out in the more different ways the more it will you know kind of sink through because there are a couple things that need to be done and that that the rest of that paragraph actually happens there's not made up story the uh i was writing that thing about beacon chain and my phone pinged and i looked at your validators proposed a block well i mean when you're running 12 000 validators it's probably you know that's a joke by the way i'm going to let you talk about this

i'll just i'll just listen uh this lido ah yeah okay um what's wrong about lidar i've been on the fence about lido for a long time we've talked about it before and you know i know that you have strong views and i've sort of perhaps expressed a more moderate view however i think more recently there's the true colors of the people behind lido have come out and i'm referring to the vote they had about uh looking at ways to self-limit lydo now that they're around 32 percent of the the network gaining more than 33 yeah danny characterized it as uh looks like an attack on the on the protocol and you know i i sort of expected that

there might be a range of views amongst lido uh ldo token holders uh people you know who who really owned the protocol as it were um that you know the vote i'm i was pretty sure that it would vote not to self-limit but i expected to see maybe 70 30 or 80 20. you know that at least there were some people in in there who had the good of the protocols the ethereum protocol at heart but it was something like 99.8 or 99.94 you know against doing anything to self-limit and the and the vote didn't even specify a mechanism to self-limit it was just no we're not even touching that we're not even going to talk about it we're not going to go near it

and that just just opened my eyes the scales fell from my eyes at this point i thought you know these people um do not have the interest of ethereum at heart i'm not going to give them another break um so that was it so i've listened to a lot of podcasts recently with lido people on um or about lido in general and about this sde and where the lido is a threat to protocol governments and i was quite pleased to find this unchanged one which was um from last week with uh ryan berkmans and alexander uh bergeron uh there was some good stuff and not not the usual party line some really insightful comments uh and views and there's a really good rant from ryan around 41 minutes in where um

he just lays it bare you know i think this is going to be a long battle for the soul of ethereum lido centralization is probably the biggest ever issue ever he repeats it uh to pop up perhaps the biggest community issue since the dow fork i mean he lays it on thick but i think you know i'm persuaded that it is warranted um now the question is what do we do about it i mean and it's really hard um you know i much prefer can't be evil to begging people not to be evil and we're kind of in the situation of kind of just trusting that people are not going to be evil at this point um it's hard to come up with solutions by which people can't be evil um but uh yeah so

but seeing seeing the situation what it is is a good first step yeah right okay rant over oh no that's great because you know um i have discovered that uh i get anxiety when i when i when i fight like that kind of fight when it's when it's client diversity and i know we're all winning and no one there's no loser like no one has to really give up anything but in this kind of fight there are people with a lot of money on the line um there are people who expect to profit significantly uh and they're not happy if they don't profit um that's that's not really my kind of of battle so i i am appreciative of people like ryan who

um are are better equipped to fight those battles because at the end of the day i'm a community builder um and when it when it transcends community building then i'm glad there are people who uh will will take a different and more aggressive stand against things that are dangerous for us so yeah yeah absolutely so i was very keen to kind of surface that from you know buried 40 minutes into a podcast and just yeah i say uh you know you you and i are not the only people saying this there are other thinkers out there who have a strong view and the and the argument is very coherent i mean you know it's much more to it than a few sound bites there's there's some you know deep um reflection on on on what the potential

threats are from from this um cartelization at the end of the day the question becomes uh are you here for the success of ethereum or are you here to extract value from ethereum um and i think it's not difficult to tell where um where this falls but i'll let people judge that for themselves right indeed indeed great explainers i love this one i don't know fubar i don't know if you do but i love this one yeah good nice high level overview of everything that's going on um i recognize that diagram may or may not have been lifted from a certain work i'm

producing that doesn't boy you have actual fonts though right but i do love your drawing style um it's it's sharing it's public good sharing right uh but yeah that's a great article i really really encourage others to check it out uh and lattice loss they may be boast yeah let's laughs uh known as a lady dan on um twitter i think and um reddit is i met ladies laos at um devconnect and uh what a lovely guy i mean we just we had just such a nice conversation and yeah so big big fan uh so yeah he um picks up this med boost thing and just goes through

all of the background so there's an faq on you know all of the background what it means for stake is coming and and all of that so yeah i thoroughly recommend getting familiar with the material here if you are validating on ethereum cool i you know i'm looking at these they look hand-drawn then i wonder is there a tool that creates those to appear hand-drawn and they're yeah this is uh from um you can do this with um i think it's called diagrams.net now it used to be draw.io uh so if you uh click sketch mode then uh you can do this yeah on uh july 18th 2022 uh i i realized that those might not be hand done zelic

yeah um so this is about the uh kind of application layer what do you know you're a smart contract developer or you're building your dap um what do you need to know about coming out of the the merge and so they've covered that very nicely it's a great article and actually you know covers all the bases and the and the bottom line is not very much but there are a few little corner cases that might might be gotchas for your app so just you know review um uh review the article if if that's you and just check uh that it's all good okay uh and i'm i'm loving ethereum pools uh discussions about rewards and penalties so this one is fantastic yeah this is another another win for draw.io i

believe do you mean it's not hand done i'm such a fool all this time um say but let me say like people who are afraid to stake from home uh are generally afraid of the consequences they're afraid of losing everything and i think you know one of the most important messages to get to them is uh you're not going to lose your stake you're not like worst case scenario is like leaking for a day and losing you know .01 east uh but i really want to encourage people to not be afraid of what they're going to lose and instead realize the value and how they're going to support ethereum absolutely yep spot on

like clients what's this one uh yeah another great uh little throw from nietzsche he does these every now and again just literally explaining the threads on twitter and they're always worth a read you'll you'll always learn something so nimbus is getting big into light clients now there's another another um thread from yatech today and uh yeah good stuff yeah so let me tell you uh nimbus is also releasing a deb installer for uh their client which is a thing i have been it been so eager uh because it's it'll set up the system service uh that means it'll it'll put everything where it needs to go and all the user has to do is install the dev or uh you know even a pseudo-app install or

a d-package install so i i love you know i for a long time i it took me a long time to become endeared uh to nimbus but they are probably the fastest grower uh in terms of endearment in my mind lately yeah uh we we we we have your issue on our backlog and it's somewhere near the top but um yeah i can't promise it in the next couple of weeks but maybe the next couple of months if if you want to be on fizz's good list all you got to do just kidding um book progress congratulations to you i actually read it yeah just yeah plowing on um

yeah i'm working on uh casper ffg now which is which is fun that's going to be a big one so may not be at updates for a few weeks but uh wrestling with that now what would you consider would you consider the book to be one of your major so obviously project lead at our project owner at teku is you know one of your big trophies on the mantle placement would you consider the book to be kind of similar like right beside that yeah um i'm trying to spend about half my time and my work time on this and that's got the blessing of my my peers and my management such as it is uh and

you know joe and all of that so you know consensus is supporting this um through about half my time there though you know soft and evenings and weekends as well so it you know it's one of my uh goals that i'm committed to um uh in in in my day job to to get this out so uh yeah yeah definitely one of one of the big things i love that i almost understand this that's that excites me anytime i'm reading through this and i'm like holy crap i know what he's talking come on that doesn't take much see dev connect layer one workshop is available that's going to be a youtube class it's been been a little while uh it's not actually youtube oh it is

youtube sorry my my um the yeah a bunch of talks uh um i uh we so we had these two days of uh layer one things uh it goes into quite a lot of detail with sort of deaths talking to devs in the these ones um uh but um there's a lot of good stuff about what's coming over the next two three years to in protocol so we barely talked about the merger it was all post-modern stuff i did i did ten minutes on kzg commitments and um i'm happy to report i've lost 12 pounds since doing that talk because i look the camera keeps showing me from a side angle and i'm hanging out all over the place

it's just appalling so i i've been shamed into into losing uh losing a few pounds so i'm on a good good trajectory i i'm at my peak weight today and i saw some pictures from this weekend and i thought you know it's it's time to stop fizz it's um so congratulations on 12 pounds that's that's awesome yeah kind of halfway there it's it's rough um i love the cat herders they put out such quality content we always toast the cat herders in these these sessions so they're fantastic um so thanks for that uh and i didn't hear this i wasn't even aware of it it's on my playlist i haven't heard it

yet um apparently there's lots of good stuff about governance uh how how ethereum uh does governance and how the beacon chain governance needs to be worked through so um i will uh it's on my playlist probably listen to it tomorrow i'm thinking maybe i'll listen on today's walk oh one hour oh it's a perfect length for a walk that's what i'm doing today and oh ball wants to propose changes to the way of alligators handle aggregation duties right yeah yeah consume this this is a little bit technical so this is around um what used to be called secret shared validators have now become distributed validator technology this is where

instead of running your keys on a single machine which is then a single point of failure you can run a validator which is across maybe four machines and they share keys so they each have a part of the key and you use a threshold signature scheme to to build so as long as say three out of the four validators sign off on a transaction then you then that gets sent to the network and it does its work so you've got some redundancy um against you know a validator going off in a fork or or failing it in some way so um there are different ways this can be implemented they're just kind of working through it's sort of experimental about

how best to implement this the protocol is designed to make it reasonable to do but actually the engineering practicalities of quite where you sit the distributed validator client whether you put it between the signer and the validator client or between the validator client and the beacon node um yeah and where it does its work is is under discussion and um obol um had a particular view they wanted to you know particular method they wanted to do but the current way that this the spec is written makes it difficult so that that's that um seems to be danny ryan has suggested a very practical workaround uh for this which

needs some minor changes in clients so we'll probably go with that interesting yeah i i'm still it's funny as long as dvt solutions you know block snowball have been around quite a while now um and i i guess i did yet did the original research i think yeah yeah that's right it's been around a while i still haven't haven't fallen in love like i'm still waiting for that uh that butterflies on my stomach feeling but i guess yep yeah it's coming various test notes are being built and or have been running for a while and uh yeah it's infrastructure stuff yeah yeah um so

yeah couple of calls awkward devs consensus steps calls this is the most important link in the entire you buried the lead um but yeah your notes about uh the talk for uh test net launch thanks to tim um so or while not test net but gurley and maintenance so uh very exciting yep and christine's twitter notes i haven't looked at this yet i've looked at twitter notes yeah yeah this is this is weird this is bizarre writing essays in twitter um not not in linked tweet form but actually i this i haven't come across this before so i need to look into it but uh this is very interesting to read too

yep yes good stuff all right thank you christine um let's see just getting to the end uh we know about inferior solar solo stickers forum we know about um e-stickers validator merge prep shop i'm very excited for that we have um i think the last check 31 000 people signed up for this if you know what that means i know what this means there's a poe yeah so there are not 31 000 people signed up for this but whatever and presumably something is planned for the gurley merge events uh as well is that says

bankless hosting or that's the that's the intention i haven't spoken with david about it in probably three weeks uh but the last time we chatted about it uh we felt like bankless would host gurley along with each staker and then the big pie in the sky is bankless uh daily guay and eath staker all together on the ethereum foundation channel kind of just bringing everyone in the world who cares to one place in the past we've we've ended up having several events and it i think it ends up being confusing and developers you know feel obligated to hop to all the calls um and so by

getting it all in one place i think it will be a great celebration yeah yeah it definitely helps i've done that call hopping thing uh yeah previously yes that's rough yeah great look forward to it that's going to be quite something and it's ecc this week right are you that is right etc in paris i failed to get a ticket blockchain enabled ticketing solution was a disaster so anyway i won't give you the whole sorry story but uh i failed to get a ticket um yeah it's all it's all happening i'll catch up with the talks later did you did you do the traditional do you know who i am if i if i cared that much i would have applied to to speak at the event um but yeah no it's fine it's happening without

me but it's uh well over a hundred of your fahrenheit's in paris this week which i'm not built for so um we're quite happy to lead them to it okay um cool i think that's right stereo here i don't know yeah oh yeah just kind of chugs along there they're doing uh some incredible work yeah that's uh if you don't know and i know you know starium is a fantastic solution for people who don't want to work under the hood with a client ui but want a graphical installer that is just about staking you know there's dapnode and novato that are kind of multi-purpose they do a lot of different things but stereo is completely focused on

graphical staking so it's a great product and it's free totally free so yeah thank you all right ben uh it's been great i will throw this thing up on youtube and uh have a hot week my friend thank you sir it will indeed be a hot week