What's new in Eth2 - 26 August 2022 #100 (Final edition) with Ben Edgington and superphiz

Transcript

hey everyone i am superfiz and i'm here with my dear friend ben edgington hey everybody hi friends good to talk again good buddy good to see you about every fortnight uh really just for the past how many times can i say fortnite in one like block for the past few months um ben and i have been recording versions of his what's new in eth2 newsletter uh and today i'm really excited for ben's hundredth newsletter yeah we made it triple digits we did um and so we we'll talk about this for you know an hour or so and i hope you really enjoy listening it listening to it um if you skip to the bottom of the newsletter uh this fortnight you'll recognize that

then has um decided to reprioritize his efforts is that a fair way to say it yeah i think that's reasonable um just draw a line under the relentless cycle the treadmill of producing the um the ethereum news every every two weeks uh focus on some other things for for uh the next little while but you know not going anywhere i might do some special editions every now and again um and so yeah watch his space we'll see yeah i i sort of hoped um as i'm because you know for me it is it's a grieving process like because i have enjoyed doing this and i'm thinking you know let's just keep logging onto zoom um every couple weeks and like

we we may not have the guidance of the newsletter but there's always so much to talk about um so maybe they they wouldn't be as long but they could still be valuable chats if you're interested in uh figuring that out i would love to do that we can yeah maybe take two or three of the big events of the last couple of weeks and and talk nonsense about them for a few minutes yeah and see if anyone wants to listen um i also want to bring up a another thing here's something funny i literally i'm on zoom like i don't know a couple hours a day and every time i get in the call i'm like i don't know how this thing works um so i'm going to share this screen um

we also have kind of a thing today so a poep for your 100th edition oh wow that's awesome i i love it this is art thanks to sleety.eth um who i call um between on vedica.ethan and sleety.east if i need and well diablo verde uh if i need art like those those folks always come through um and so i haven't really brought this much up to you but i kind of wanted to discuss it because i do believe um people if you're just listening to this it's a it's a uh a poep image with bins um kind of pfp in the middle of it and it

says e2 news um 100 editions um and my my intention my idea is to distribute this to people who want it uh you s if you if anyone who follows poep a lot knows that we have to kind of limit distributions because if we just kind of give codes out then you'll have a bot farmer who gets all of them and people who want them don't get them so the way that i intend to distribute this um and i actually i didn't speak about this before but um usually the way we do it is that you would pick an organization that you like um it could even be yourself if that's your choice

and we would put a a very small price like .001 eth on this uh and then use poep checkout and people could go and claim one um for that small fee um does that does that resonate with you at all uh this is awesome fizz i am blown away um looks amazing and yeah i just really appreciate the thought uh do you have in mind a uh a good cause i did not think of a cause because i didn't want to um yeah i didn't want to take your your opportunity i have something in mind but it would need a bit of management um so i think it might have been last time the time before we talked about um the uh lefterists who's running the

berlin marathon in a few weeks he's um raising money for a charity for babies with heart defects for research into that and um great cause uh and you know great effort from him so i would love to support that i don't think lefteris wants to get you know lots of tiny donations uh and things i think it just becomes complicated but if we could kind of pull stuff and then send it over to him i i would love to support that if that's possible i i believe that's very workable uh and so ideally before i publish this call i'll chat with left harris um and organize that and uh hopefully by the time i publish this call there will be a link at the bottom um where people can go to

the new poep checkout i have to say poep checkout is in beta uh it is developed by mentor who is an absolutely fantastic human i have to say that every time because he is um but we have had a few bugs with it so if you don't receive your poep after the checkout just uh ping me super fizz on twitter and i will uh help you get it straightened out but yeah um i i love it and i really love what you've done for the community uh and i'm not ready to give up on our hangouts but congratulations on 100 issues thank you that's awesome all right let's do this let's see steak from home your pick of

the week your pick of the week sir i just loved it i mean that so so you put up a um a tweet saying you will retweet pictures of anybody's homestaking rig and you've just been drowning in responses are just so many and uh brilliant uh absolutely brilliant yeah so uh showing uh the mobile one is awesome david theodore yeah in his uh um in his rv is that i i don't know what your terminology is for that but uh solar power is taking rig just with with starlink awesome yeah um that response and also i love the vcr one but

uh and this is also a big winner uh but and i think this is one of the most popular ones my favorite thing about this kind of image is the message i've really been trying to get across to people and was the whole purpose for this hashtag and that is that anyone can do it anyone can have a nook you know you spend a few hours figuring out the instructions you bang your head for a while because it's you know it's not simple but then you figure it out and it works and you're staking and these images of the knucks just make my day because they show that anyone can do it yeah totally a lot of nuts out there but also a big

variety of other bits and pieces raspberry pies yeah yeah cable management stuff this is similar to what mine would look like uh jonathan mann wrote a song about it so i haven't heard that one yet how awesome i was about to say who that one is but i guess people are uh anonymous but yeah it it uh it turned out really well um and i think it really does kind of humanize access to staking which is one of my personal goals like i want people to realize hey you can use you know 200 bucks worth of hardware the raspberry pi and ssd and steak it's not it's not out of reach for normal people so um yeah very cool yeah this is this is so much the ethereum vision right i

mean democratize it um and uh yep loved it yeah what gave you the idea to uh to kick that off that was a shower thought was it well it's kind of like you said it's the vision of ethereum the reason that i the reason i don't shut up is because i believe in the vision of ethereum i believe in a truly decentralized network and if we don't encourage normal people to participate then centralization is the default and you know it's just another me trying to encourage people to understand that this network is made up of individuals not of corporations that's all yeah yep brilliant thank you ron paul

[Laughter] yeah that's such a great meme as long as i'm alive this will be my crypto celebratory uh meme so uh thanks ron paul um the announcement was up uh the announcements was delayed by a day too much consternation because uh geth managed to put out a broken release uh which was a bit of an oops but they fixed it quickly and um there was a just a slight delay while we kind of worked out where we stood with that and how to respond but they fixed it quickly and then the announcement was up no change to merge date no change to bellatrix so back to back on track that uproar was kind of uh

kind of interesting like you know that there was a target for that announcement and um yeah it so i i actually i updated geth to 22. uh when i saw the regression and you know that it corrupted the database i panicked but i dodged a bullet so very happy to see that uh it did come through it is it is good to see that how do i frame this correctly it's good that we observed a gath fault right now we need people to realize that client diversity matters um and this is it's a it's a non-critical uh

it's nearly critical but it's non-critical and so it's it's good to get that message out anecdotally i have access to the um metrics that we have on the documentation sites that uh consensus has and uh there was a big uptick in searches for baisu um just after the uh i guess bug was announced which uh which is good to see yeah that um i i was going to say that coincided with my choice to run a basey archwife node but i think i had already pre-planned that but uh good um let's see some of these important notes uh and a lot of these are are what you i don't want to call them gotchas but they are uh extremely important things to know

um yeah i mean i'm hoping that people who read uh read this and have been reading you know what's new are up to speed on all this but i i having spoken with people around who who are clueful people people who keep up to date with things and you know know their etherium have been around a long time um there's a surprising level of um not i don't say ignorance but you know unawareness lack of awareness about uh what exactly it entails to be merged ready um even even among people who are you know fully in crypto and doing crypto stuff on a daily basis they're just not as close to it as as you and i are so

um yeah i just keep trying to sort of amplify the message big red boxes and whatever um just so people aren't caught by surprise it's my main concern now about the merge everything else is sweet the protocol is good the clients are good we're all ready in that the the one thing that can go wrong now is people are not ready and that's not in our hands anymore you know we've done the we put protocol built it designed it we've done the clients coded them up tested everything tested to death and now it's out of our hands it's up to everybody out there yeah it's it's the community now and that that's why now is the time people need to talk to their friends uh talk to the people they know online talk to the people if you're

lucky enough to know someone in real life who is actually staking for some of us that's like you know a far reach to know someone who's actually staking in real life but talk to your friends about uh hey you know did you upgrade your node are you ready did you set a fee recipient um do you have a jwt secret it it's the right time to chum up to your buddies and sort of make sure that they're on board because uh a lot of you know we all boarded a lot of stakers who aren't following every day who may somehow possibly not even know the merge is happening um and now is the time to kind of reach out to those people and make sure they're okay yep totally um

are you merge ready fizz yes i am well i i have i have primary modes fallback notes how's your j how's your jwt token hey so um it actually took me a while to se because i set it up too early it's harder than it should be and i really loved hearing on the consensus layer talk um encouragement to simplify jwt secret implementation i really feel like that's that's a good goal yeah indeed i am syncing up basically for the first time on maynet so it is currently going if the bandwidth degrades that's that's why it's either that or my whole family watching the us open uh on amazon at the moment so yeah i am a little bit behind you but

uh we'll in a couple of days we'll be fully merged ready if if you glitch out i'll know it's for the network that's right um september 6th yeah yeah it's coming so september 6th is bellatrix upgrade i'm going to be on vacation so um i don't have remote access to my node i think i need to configure that just to set my mind at risk otherwise i'll be getting notifications from beacon chain and saying you've stopped to testing and you'll be too far away i need to drive home are you are you familiar with tilt with tail scale no it's it's a a remote um a remote access service that everyone seems to love okay to me it feels like a third-party

provider like i'd much rather you know use a home vpn and ssh through that um but tail scale seems to be what all of the cool people are using for remote access these days in that case i must look it up i will write it down there yeah so the point about bellatrix is that's the absolute deadline to get your um your uh what do we call it consensus client fully uh up to date so teku 22.8.1 is is the one and uh all the right versions are listed in the ethereum foundation announcement if you're not upgraded by

september 6th you will drop off the network say that technical version again tekku 22.8.1 okay yeah we do calendar versioning which is year month and then release within month which is zero based yeah i was just thinking that i'm still on version 22.7 so i might need to look that up yeah yeah uh so 8.1 has got the ttd baked in so yeah okay yeah that's the one i will check mine out so ttd wait so i i want to i want to clarify the reason you say september 6th is is the deadline is because um that is technically a chain fork uh and if you do not

or if you're not updated to bellatrix by september 6th on your consensus client then you will follow a forked head and you will have to either back up or resync is that correct correct so that's yeah so the beacon chain makes itself merge ready with bellatrix so it's not huge internally it's basically changing around a few data structures but it's um it is a a fork you know the it's not compatible with altair which is the the phase that we're currently in so anyone who remains on the altair versions will will fork off and we'll have altair and bellatrix alongside so hopefully the alt air fork will will die if you end up on it because you don't upgrade your client in time you will likely end up with bad

blocks in your database uh we have a way to recover with teku but it's manual you have to um stop your client run a utility that will delete the bad blocks and you can go back or you can just do a checkpoint sync on on bellatrix the um the the database fix up is really for archive notes which uh you know it's a big deal if you have to resync from genesis but if you can do a quick um checkpoint sync then uh that that's uh the the fastest way to recover i i want to shout out that i um i haven't used basu a lot but i've started using it the past probably three weeks um and and while i initially didn't have a large enough java heap um and i was having out of

memory errors um it's once i once i figured that out and resolved it like it's it's peachy it's running really well i'm very happy with yeah good to know uh they've been working hard yeah the team has been uh yeah very much uh between you and me and our listeners today is actually sorry today this week is a we call it productivity zero week at consensus so we are all allowed effectively to do anything we want this week basically take it off go on vacation whatever we want uh i'm spending the week writing um the baesu team have agreed not to take down time this week um because they're aware that you know they've got to

um keep on top of everything for the merge so they've postponed their their down time till after the merge so wow commitment i like that idea of productivity zero that might be a description of my life but uh thanks to the basic team for pushing on and i hope you do get your downtime much deserved uh total terminal difficulty and we know that is uh an accumulated difficulty uh on the execution layer that when we reach it it will signal uh to the execution layer and consensus layer that we are shifting uh into proof of stake and that's in lieu of a time based so and it's not

it's not time based it's not block based it's difficulty based accumulated difficulty we have these monitors so let's check these out yeah and i've missed one there's another one a bit further down a link to some dune dashboards and there's um another dune dashboard with a with a monitor and the curious thing is they all show different dates right i mean there are different assumptions and modeling going into this because hash rate is very volatile um so yeah this is um so we're looking at anything from early on september the 15th to um early on september 14th and i think the this one shows uh the one that the the merge countdown at the top is hard coded but the one

further down if you go down a few rows uh to that box there that's calculated on the fly and that's showing um 16th uh early as well so we have 14th 15th and 16th yeah uh yeah indeed um i think you might need to refresh this if you put where it says at the top input any number um there just put in a number and then click apply all parameters and then it will refresh i think that's right yeah i know it hasn't changed anything so uh yeah so we've got got a broad range so hatchery is very volatile um i've seen one uh dashboard showing 13th so who knows i'll take it i all i want

is for it to be during waking hours in my time zone that's that's all i'm asking uh yeah it's there's a sort of window of three to three or so days uh when it would occur but yeah it's fascinating to see half rate going up at the moment which uh i had not expected uh i have been obsessed with bordell.wtf this is my favorite uh viewing portal um it's by mario havel uh i've actually uh set up a co-app that we'll be distributing to for uh bordeaux.wtf here pretty soon so um that's my way of celebrating things i love this is this is your new hobby this is fantastic i don't know i think i've been doing it for like two years now but i can't stop

uh let's see testing the merge yeah maynard shadowforks uh just plug on very quiet i mean the last one went um i there was one node which wasn't quite ready for it it wasn't fully synced uh all of the other i don't um 37 odd nodes uh sailed through it with no issues whatsoever we've got um one coming in a couple of days so wednesday um uh maintenance shadowfall 12 with the with the release versions of the clients for the uh for the merge so um hopefully uh it will also sail through yeah i think this is kind of the right place to say that um there are likely to be bumps during the

merge there are likely to be when you when we have um you know four execution let clients five consensus clients and 20 combinations there is likely to be a combination that is not functioning correctly but the odds are extremely high given our diversity that even though we should and expect to experience some turbulence that the merge itself is likely to go just fine is that fair i think that that is and there have been client combinations which have been a bit bumpy though i think everything's been smoothed out now but by far the worst issues we've had on any of these forks the test net forks

or the um shadow forks have been configuration issues coming back to what we're talking about earlier and you know even the experienced people can stuff this up so um it's not it's not an easy upgrade so take care read everything read all the checklists read your logs on your clients they will tell you if they're unhappy um and uh yeah uh that will help everything go smoothly yeah i i think part of my desire is to prepare people to expect turbulence even though i'm hopeful it doesn't happen um because what you don't want is you know the the middle of this event and people see oh

we missed the first proposal um and then you know kind of flip out when uh it's totally okay like it's gonna be fine yeah yeah yeah i mean the network is literally designed to be robust against faulty nodes i mean that's the whole point of the thing is that you know a large fraction of your nodes can be faulty and it still works uh that's kind of what we're doing here building resilient distributed systems god i love ethereum um so prepping for the merge and fura has an overview yeah yeah i'm very a lot of time for infuria they have been very good about working with people and solo stakers and

app developers and you know um i i think uh they're great people i love working with them and that's a good article is there's something in there for everybody whether you're you know hosting your dab you're developing solidity code whether you're a solo staker whether you're a large scale node operator infurer's article is um you know there's something in there for you uh just to confirm uh infuriation is a consensus company right it is uh part of consensus that's right no it wasn't a joke i just i wasn't i couldn't remember i mean yeah anyway so terence who i absolutely adore uh has some great merged pitfalls

yeah a nice summary uh and yeah so these are all the things i'll go ahead and say them really quickly just because somebody one may be listening um so you do need to two clients consensus and execution um you may still have uh your old port for 8545. um i think now we've switched to default of 8551 or and that's authenticated with a jwt secret which is a a kind of a hash uh is well it's is it a hash no it's just random random data random data that will be shared between execution and consensus to make sure that it's a one-to-one um

communication channel um forgetting to sit your fee recipient if you forget to set this it's you're not gonna get paid your uh your priority fees and tips uh and not not opening up uh the new firewall hole um which i haven't done but i'm not having a peer problem so maybe it's a upnp issue uh i think that's referring to um uh the eight five five one if you run on different machines if you're on your consensus client and you're executing that's right it's on the land okay yeah yeah yeah uh teku i think will refuse to start if you didn't specify execution engine endpoints if you didn't supply your jwt token or you didn't set

the fee recipient taker just won't start which is quite a yeah we've we've taken the kind of sledgehammer approach to so read the error messages and it will tell you what what it thinks is wrong um uh on that yeah that's that's new um the latest version the previous versions would start without that well and it's you know on what level you have not configuring your updated clients correctly and on the other level you have the not updating your clients and assuming everything is fine um and so we're likely to experience some some fallout from people who just didn't upgrade at all so oh yeah what's gonna happen those people caught up that's good i have

uh samarasat yeah um yeah i mean you know there aren't enough words uh summer has just been outstanding in his diligence keeping these guides updated he's been working on these for you know over two years uh now since he first wrote his first set of guides and i probably he wonders what he got himself into from and i know you know he appears on discord he asks questions he asks for review he makes sure that everything is accurate you know these these are uh reliable and um thorough um love him yeah i'm he has uh instructions on this github going back to uh the topaz test net

um which may 31st 2020 that's 30 years ago in crypto time um yeah and he's absolute gem of a person uh and so he'll also be on our uh on our live stream um excellent so yeah looking forward to seeing both of you um let's see we got here so ethereum.org is all updated yeah though there is a banner right across the top which uh if you're in dark mode it comes massive orange banner in your face saying it's not updated it's blue if you're in light mode um there you go if you go to the relevant pages it'll tell you they're not updated but they are

how cool let's see this page is out of date great but they are so you seem to have a lot of familiarity with uh japanese language yeah just showing off i did study japanese for a few years just on my own time but i forgot nearly everything so my my brain doesn't uh retain stuff anymore but uh uh yeah um and i spent a good amount of time in japan one way or another so uh have a fondness for it um yeah this looks great i was very happy to uh get a reach out from one of the people who participated in steak from home uh

who said here will you share my note and also i created these directions and i ran them through google translate and i was like this is great this is great so yeah very cool to have that yeah yeah so this is a self um or home server uh staking guide um one of my most in the stake from home one of the most exciting things was seeing people who were not in the western hemisphere um participating and so yeah i'm really happy to see that diversity e sticker did merch work merge workshop four did you attend i didn't get to this one unfortunately

i think i popped in for a moment uh but i i don't i don't want to splatter my face all over everything i sometimes i want other people to shine so that's a i um i dipped into the recording at various places and i could hear that you know knowledge bombs uh everywhere so yeah it's uh always excellent these guys are so knowledgeable and so generous with their knowledge it's just fantastic absolutely um thurston and uh remy i just they are bottomless pits of knowledge and anvedica does such a great job of relaying that in ways that mortals can

understand so yeah i'm very proud of them we've seen the merge readiness checklist a lot we've talked talked about that a lot mm-hmm yeah yeah ah so solo straight solo staking you'd have thought it's very trendy very trendy at the moment wonder why you know i i don't know how many people realize that where we are now wasn't a given that that staking could have remained in the hands of the elite it could have remained in the hands of operators and entities and only like power users taking from

home so it is just so great to see normal people doing it uh leo glisic is uh working on this solar staker initiative do you know much about this i only know what i read on twitter not deeply he's we've chatted about it um but i've really encouraged him to um to run with it uh kind of decentralized style and he's doing a great job so he has all of my support but i'm not deeply involved fair enough yep yeah it looks like fun and yeah also uh leo is uh i think he

has a contest for nfg nft generation so yeah and paid for as well for the um the winning designs well what i'm really hopeful for and i i hope this would happen with poeps and it hasn't yet i hope that an identifier of solo note operation will uh be a a dropping point for uh anyone who wants to recognize people who give value to our decentralized network so yeah it's not 100 clear to me how uh anyone will identify solo stakers um but uh i mean deposit address might be something but um yeah i'm not

they've posted their method it's it's essentially um yeah starting with deposit address and then filtering out known entities um yeah so it's essentially a filter list but okay i do think it's a valid attempt i really uh so it may not filter out small entities but small entities are essentially you know providing the same level of decentralization by filtering out the largest entities we can focus on the smaller providers cool yeah like it uh marceaux staking shark i'm interested to hear your thoughts on this because i got i got slammed a little bit for for promoting it yeah i mean it's uh what do i like i

like that there's a spectrum uh of uh staking it very much highlights that you know there are um two ends and degrees in the middle and it identifies the the factors which uh go into decision-making you know around whether it's uh trustless permissionless um whether it's um enables liquid staking uh and so on i mean some of the um uh compatibility you know some some of it might be making assumptions which haven't been proven in reality around censorship or whatever um but you know in general terms i think it's

uh if we take these you know the red and the orange and the green slightly yeah make it a little fuzzier than it than it then it works well that's me at first blush it it's consistent with everything that i generally hold true um i do you know a lot of people found holes to poke in it and i don't disagree with those but i do feel like on balance it is um it's generally reflective of where we're at yeah i think so i mean we can argue about the the details but i mean i think the general categories moving from left to right are the right ones and um yeah interesting opportunity space in

the middle for um for uh newcomers to to occupy i love that he left that um and i you know i could almost debate that rocketpool would be on the other side of it because there's still a lot of opportunity to do better um i look forward to that hey so i've heard about sedge i haven't looked at it have you looked at it uh not in detail i just had a quick uh glance at the repo so this was brought up on uh i think the um consensus deaf school last week and yeah i hadn't been aware that never mind have clearly been working on this for a little while um and uh the idea is it's another sort of one-click um set up your your staking operation tool

supports a bunch of different clients and um not fully mature yet but keen to receive contributions and yeah good on never mind for putting it together yeah it makes me think a little bit of eth docker um and i would really love to uh just do like a walk through with that um just to share it because i think it's gonna be pretty awesome so i saw this the kiln thing um i don't recall but did you post that someone posted that and i because of who posted it i was like oh that's really interesting um yeah it was it was me it was a

credibility it was a it was credibility by association i guess is where i'm going it might have been maybe perry or someone who you know when someone has a lot of credibility and they share something you're like oh well it must be credible retweet immediately yeah do you want to read this article no just retweet it uh yeah i mean it's it's good stuff for us all to think about how we monitor our own nodes maybe not so relevant to your you know average small staker um they are um thinking in terms of setups with you know hundreds to thousands of validators for some of these metrics but uh i think it's good to ask yourself the

questions you know am i monitoring the right things am i going to be aware if something goes uh goes wrong um uh we had uh a an issue raised with us today as teku team about teku um turned out that the operator um large stake operator i'll tell you who it is once we stopped recording um i'd run out of disk space um and you know that's a no-brainer it's easy to monitor right um uh but it's not necessarily easy to tell from oh we've just stopped the testing um so monitoring the right stuff that's um you know my big takeaway from that is always that home users in many cases are as robust as

large providers um while large providers may have more experts on staff um lots of us know how look at a system and see if it's running or not so so alex stokes alabaster i'm not familiar with this uh yeah uh implementation of the specs so so we have this uh consensus beacon change specification uh which is we call it the state transition effectively is how you process blocks and attestations um and it's written in python uh in in the spec repo and we generate the test cases directly from the spec it's executable so we can

actually run the spec generate the test cases and all the clients conform to that uh alex has done a version in rust which is more trendy than python uh also more performant um and uh yeah i'm not sure what his long-term goals are with this but uh it's another sort of um arrow in the quiver um and yeah potentially it's useful for building testing around or um other infrastructure stuff where it's useful to have a sort of state transition handy i i point out that yeah implementing the spec is like five percent or less than actually writing a client i used to think it was maybe half of the work of writing client but now

i mean it's yeah the state transition is is nothing is the the it's the networking it's the database it's the logging it's you know everything around it the command line it's the optimizations um you know uh everything else is um just dwarfs actually writing you know implementing the spec um but yeah i love that because people are like why did it take four years to implement the spec and it didn't take four years to implement the spec it took four years to implement everything else yeah the sinking and uh you know yeah checkpoint sync and the whole thing is is massive

i love this word by the way crosstalk yeah i knew right i only wrote this paragraph so i could use the word rustation so dune dashboards with uh if2 yeah i know you like your dashboards um yeah a bunch of um beacon chain and uh merge related stuff here if you go down to the last one there's another emerge predictor um i think uh that one is another merge predictor which um is predicting the 14th now uh yep the funny thing with these is um you know as many predictions as we've done you would kind of think that they would

coalesce on one that is most accurate but we always still have multiple implementations with different different heuristics yeah i mean it's nobody knows what the most accurate is uh we just can't predict future hash rate i mean so you assume you know the hash point rate at this point in time will be constant until the merge and work on that basis or we take an average over the last day or the last week or we do what ball dell does and do some sort of polynomial fit to recent hatchery and predict doing that but you know who's to say which is best i mean it's uh it's effectively a random walk yeah my money's on bordell let's see

tell me about what adrian has done this week oh it's this is this is just a small thing he's just making some notes um on uh it's rather technical but this actually popped up in discord earlier somebody asked how to do this uh how do you download blocks on a non-canonical fork so if you get a fork in the beacon chain sometimes you want to look at your node believes that beacon chain is following one fork but you want to get the the blocks from the other fork that it effectively can't see it's decided to down downgrade that the importance of that so um not all clients actually store those uh blocks so um non-canonical blocks techy does and so you can um you can retrieve them so

that's just a it's one for the the the pointy heads this this one i'm just happy to see a code snippet that i can read like she'll script yeah yeah he even adrian shell scripting is so much more beautiful than mine i just i read it on weep so validator execute that's going to be a big deal here in the next few months yeah i mean more so when withdrawals are enabled but um so what you can do now if you want to cease validating you could you can actually initiate an exit you've always been able to do this and then you'll you can turn your validator off once it's complete you know it takes a day or so you turn your validator off

and then you can um what's you know remains in your account on the beacon chain when withdrawals are enabled so if you no longer want to stake you don't want to maintain your equipment or whatever that there is an exit route you literally send the voluntary exit message uh and then but your funds are locked up until withdrawals now of course when withdrawals are enabled that will catalyze people to exit more potentially um if you know because they can get their funds back if they if they need that for for any reason um the exit queue is rate limited and the current rate is six validators per epoch that's 1 350 a day and we've got you know 400 000 odds so

that's best part of a year if everybody wants to exit um uh yeah so this thread doesn't actually calculate that six per epoch number but all the rest of the info is there why we have the queue and so on uh is is in there i just wanted to kind of highlight the actual number so that people are aware and i i'm under the impression that um because of like changes in custody of validators between large entities that um some of those large entities will necessarily necessarily uh exit and re-enter and so i i

my personal belief is that the valid the execute is going to appear to be inflated um by by the appearance of exeters and i think that's going to also like add fuel to people saying oh people are exiting i should exit too and that's really uh these large entities who essentially like let's say that i had a validator but then my company got bought by ben's company um and so but i'm still i still control those keys it's funny that i said ben's company um and and so i when the merge happens i would then need to exit uh and transfer that to ben so that he could uh have full custody of those and it wouldn't be

shared between two parties yeah be interesting to see i'm not going to sweat it i mean 400 000 validators plus i mean you know we're strong i i really think that um after september 15th that we're going to see a fresh new influx of and maybe that influx won't come till after withdrawals are enabled but there are there is a school of thought that says um having withdrawals enabled actually de-risks things for people and there will be more people willing to stake at that point and that there is a theory that there's a lot of city on the sidelines that doesn't want to get logged up indefinitely but when you know can stake an unstake in a

reasonable amount of time is likely to come on board so who knows who knows yeah yeah well yeah we don't have to speculate but i do think newer solutions that allow more liquid um not liquidity token but more liquid staking uh are going to appear um let's see what do you got where do you want to go here we need to crack on a bit now we're fine hey and you know what it's your last it's your last article if if the way people and they swear they're never gonna watch another one then the joke's on them

um yeah fortune magazine so yeah uh crypto's going uh mainstream right i mean i i rejoice when i see uh accurate articles in in the relatively mainstream media about crypto stuff because there's so much nonsense out there and you know this this article is is uh by and large accurate um they have their little what could go wrong you know a little bit of jeopardy but that's you know just journalists doing journalist stuff but um it it actually says true things which is oh look at this quoting our boy you know that is that's a big shift i've

observed in um what i want to call the five or six months um notably so there are a couple um but uh cnbc fortune um and um oh there's one more that is mainstream news outlets who are really trying to get it right so i love it now when you know that um when you point something out and they're like oh i'm sorry that isn't correct let me fix it and i'm like wow that's great like i really appreciate their support totally um i think preston from prison

was in new york times today i haven't read it yet but i sort of saw a picture on the twitter demonstrating his hair yeah exactly okay hold on we have to i was going to type in preston van loon hair can't type because room on the um net worth what's this net worth preston van lien new york times is it new york times i think so i think so this is a reputable i just want to see this screenshot are they can't wait for ethereum's okay well so um

i was really hoping to see this uh image that i oh this is it oh that's that's our buddy but to know preston uh he's just a humble sweet guy and he's just filled with knowledge and i haven't read this yet but i can't wait what a great picture yeah i just i i saw that it just that's uh you know aside from aside from being the developer of one of the of one of the strongest consensus clients uh preston's other claim to famous his hair so yeah maybe the third best hair in crypto

i don't know that's that that's a rage i'm not going to get into that debate actually no i'll take it back i'll tell was probably nasty though did they uh ethereum cat herders doing a great job is always giving out really quality information so have you i i have to confess i haven't heard anthony sosano on ssv networks stuff uh yeah well he interviewed me for one of the sessions and um it was great he yeah he was exactly i had no choice um and uh yeah no um he did a great job just let it through very nicely indeed so he's done there's been quite a few of

these i flagged them up most of them i over the weeks i don't really get on very well with listening to twitter spaces i have to say but they have said they will publish the recordings separately so i'm waiting for that and then i can download and listen when i'm out and about yeah it's good exercise material it doesn't matter if we've used all of our time this is this is the second most important thing in this art in this newsletter the first thing being your uh i was gonna call it retirement but you're not really retiring you're just changing gears you're still at consensus you're still writing the book um we're still gonna meet in two weeks right uh but let's talk about the

tornado that yeah let's talk about the tornado yep indeed um you know i mean that's a massive subject every single podcast i've listened to for the last two weeks uh and have been a lot of them have been uh about um you know the ofac sanctions um thing and it's gone crazy so much speculation concerned trolling and so on i mean it's it it's massive and the reality is that it's yeah the the actual real situation today is is nothing like what people out there are portraying i mean right so um but i think people are concerned about a direction of travel where we could end

up potentially with a censored ethereum and yeah so first thing to say is that justin drake is on bankless episode that was released today and he did a talk over the weekend about censorship in ethereum he's published the slides you can find them on twitter if you um look for uh justin drake there and you know he he covers this in much more depth and much more uh knowledgeably than than i do in a couple of paragraphs here but it's effectively the same message there are two ways in which people might notice so let's say stakers might censor ethereum might choose to try to to to

censor out of fear of being on the wrong side of of sanctions they only apply to u.s citizens um or people associated in some sense with uh with the united states so you know most of us at this point don't need to worry about it um but yeah people might self-censor i think justin calls this uh soft censorship um or weak censorship i should say um which means that i as a staker i refuse to include in any block i create a transaction which i'm uncomfortable with because i feel it violates a a sanction or or it might be something like you know it tries to extract mev or something but you know whatever it is i'm not happy with that transaction i i

refuse to include it in my block and you know ethereum is highly resilient to that um it you know block builders have the privilege proposers have the privilege of choosing transactions from the from the memphis and they've always had that freedom they order them how they like and you know this is recognized in protocol and that's a reason we rotate block proposals you know some protocols yeah some old-fashioned bft protocols have a leader that's a leader until they you know act in some way against the protocol and then they're outvoted and somebody else becomes the leader we don't do that we rotate the leadership every single block so that we

can make sure that everybody gets a fair crack and nobody can have control you know permanently of of which transactions are included in the network so ethereum is resilient to that eventually someone will come along who will include your transaction in order for that to be effective a hundred percent of the nodes would have to be censoring and and you know that's not going to happen um now it's not great for the person who's whose transaction might get censored they might have to wait a long time and have to pay higher gas fees you know to to get it in a block but ultimately it's better than the status quo where you know in in the real world in the you know the normal

financial system they may have absolutely no way to transact and so ethereum gives away it may not be perfect but it is yeah it is achievable it's a zero to one kind of thing they can do something now that they couldn't before um so i'm relatively relaxed about that not delighted you know i'd rather people didn't censor stuff but it's not going to break anything if they do uh on that weak censorship much more concerning and this is what we've been talking about on on the death calls is actively censoring the network or i think justin calls it strong censorship whereby i as a staker i refuse to recognize any block that contains a transaction i

don't like so in addition to not making blocks i don't that contain bad transactions i i refuse to recognize any block that contains a bad quote bad uh transaction and that means that i won't build on them and i won't attest to them um and you know there are some people saying that ofac compliance stake as well we'll have to do this uh and the way it would be implemented is the execution client would have a sort of deny list and would declare any block you know when it validates a block it would check against deny list if the block contains a transaction that it doesn't like it will declare that whole block invalid and oh you're right you get shot my son is banging on the door he's

i'll mute be a good citizen yeah well i'll i'll stop rambling on uh sure i'm loving it um so so the the issue here is that if less than 51 of stakers do this and it's basically a losing strategy all that happens is they they lose out on rewards um because the the the rest of the network won't won't recognize or reward their behavior you know they'll they'll miss the correct vote on attestations and they uh their blocks will be orphaned um it's um that the real worry is if over half of the network uh is able to agree on a bad transactions list and to actively censor blocks that contain these

transactions so this is a 50 plus percent 50 plus epsilon percent attack then they can control the fork choice rule they can control which blocks get into the chain and in that situation ethereum becomes fully censoring so if half of all stakers actively censor then we have strong censorship and the ethereum protocol then becomes censored um so the question is what do we do i mean any any kind there's a basically a 51 attack and you know blockchains are it's hard for blockchains to deal with what we have though is the layer 0 below the protocol which is you and me and all the other thousands of stakers out there and yeah we can choose what to

do about this you know um these nodes are not obeying the rules of the protocol they're not following the fork choice rule which there are specific rules about which blocks are correct or incorrect they're violating those rules and so the discussion at the last couple of deaf schools has been um can we or we should we slash them for that behavior they're breaking the rules of protocol we we should punish them that's normally done automatically by the protocol you know we have this automatic slashing for it censorship is very hard to detect in protocol um so it's not really possible to automate it but we can detect it out of protocol so the idea is that we

if we detect provably detect that somebody is actively 50 of network or getting close to it or a large fraction are actively censoring the network that it becomes a danger then we agree collectively um to issue client software that will uh slash them we'll exclude them from the network and then people are free to either upgrade to that or not upgrade to it it becomes a kind of dow fork situation there we go i've gone on quite long enough about that no i i love it um because i i this conversation is necessary this is a thing that we have been able to ignore for a long time um and that that allows centralization to creep in it allows people to get complacent and focus on

profit rather than the purpose of the network uh and so i'll i nope nobody's gonna want to hear me say this but i appreciate that these new sanctions and i i tornado cash is a valuable tool i i don't want to see it go opening up this conversation allows us to harden the network um before it's too late before we we fall into this false sense of security and then um are defenseless against it so yeah yeah absolutely um you've highlighted the sentence i i'm actually pretty happy that our complacency bowl has been pricked by all this we haven't had to worry about this for a while

we've almost forgotten you know what is the whole point of the thing um and uh you know in d5 summer and everything nobody everybody was having too far too much fun to kind of worry about the fundamentals permissionlessness censorship resistance yeah global reach uh these fundamental values that we have and yeah there's also been a lot of handwringing about oh sorry i should say concern trolling about moving to proof of stake and how this makes it so much worse and blah blah blah it's actually under proof of stake we have more options for dealing with this we have exactly the same weak and strong censorship issues with proof of work weak censorship where i don't include transactions i don't like in blocks

exactly the same on proof of work strong censorship where i refuse to build on a block that contains transactions i don't like exactly the same in proof of work 51 of the network can take over the proof of workforce choice rule so 51 sensor in proof of work then uh the whole network is censoring exactly the same there is there is no difference except that under proof of stake we have some tools that we can deal with this under proof work there's nothing you can do i i really like the idea um and i actually said this on twitter and i mean it um i i believe that it's wise for us demonstrate our willingness to socially slash

um a uh a validator who censors and it's i i was saying you know eastaker has a validator i i would gladly sacrifice a validator as a demonstration that it is something we will do and rather than waiting until 20 or 30 percent of the network begins censoring transactions that we are proactive and uh just like you know the four choice rules we enforce them from the beginning we don't wait until they reach a threshold to begin enforcing them because if we allow central if we allow censorship to uh sneak in it's only going to

uh to spread but if we prevent it from the beginning we may have a leaner network but it'll be a healthier network i think you should appear on the next all-court death call and uh make the proposal yeah yeah micah should say uh michael zoltu uh led the led the conversation on the deaf schools about this grateful to him for his curation of the core values of ethereum he does a great job of being our he's basically our conscience i appreciate that his his talks on both acd and consensus are the most that i've ever aligned with him um i i practically cheered him on and normally i'm like oh well you know it's an interesting

perspective but uh his thoughts on on this censorship persistent resistance i i just i fully align with so thanks michael uh let's zip through this because i know you watched the clock let's oh yeah so we're almost through but i did want to to shout out to brian armstrong who um he didn't have to make this stand he didn't have to uh go on twitter and say uh we're going to stop before we censor um but that that does demonstrate an alignment with our values um so i do appreciate that yeah and i think you know it's worth raising it's an option for people i mean you've got

this whole thing has been cast in a kind of binary way that you know you either follow ofac rules or or you don't follow ofact rules but there is a third option which is you know just stop stop staking um you know we spoke earlier about exiting you can do that today if you feel under pressure to follow the you know ofac sanctions or you're uncomfortable running a node that properly validates a network then you have an option just just stop doing it and i'd rather have fewer stakers than have stakers who are not going to act in the best interest of the network um and yeah and that's absolutely fine you know i'm not going to judge you for that yeah that's uh that's a um a good conscience principled stance to take um if you you know if you are worried about going to jail first for

validating the network then just stop validating the network just you know please don't go to jail yeah that's you know i've said many times i i will not break the law to support ethereum um but i will do everything i can to support ethereum within the legal bounds of the law and if i can't be a validator that's okay i'll exit i'll let people who can do the job do the job he's having a day um well you know i think that we we've we've knocked it out um i i know that we didn't well let's do the research too are there things that you definitely want to hit uh i

yeah i mean a lot of stuff this data availability sampling article by joking i think is new is um looks deep uh and i'm looking forward to reading that so you know if you want to kind of challenge have a great amount of work hello minnie fears if you don't have a great workout then i recommend that that's going to be my reading this week so looking forward to yep yep and you know nothing else i think uh okay um i'm sorry it's difficult being distracted um but my big guy is the best thing ever let's see uh bounties are quadrupled a million dollar

bounty uh which obviously they don't assume that anyone will claim it but more power if they can yeah outstanding quadruple bounties uh until the 8th september uh for merge related bugs regular bugs have the regular bounty but murder-related ones are forex okay danny's finalized is always worth a read yeah yeah he just i'm so uh worth highlighting merge data challenge so the madasha data challenge a couple of years ago i can't remember if we've had one since i couldn't find a record of it that was pretty some outstanding uh work i think pintail came to my attention at that time and wrote a really really good analysis of what was happening on the um

uh beacon chain through the madasha test yeah and some people got involved who are still around from that time so yeah worth definitely worth getting involved in the merged data challenge and there are prizes on offer i'm looking back at this uh edition 55 that's uh not a video yeah hopefully um the big wrap up um thanks again i i have loved uh four years of what snooty i don't i don't even know when i discovered it but it it since very early on i've been

uh following i wish that i had had the foresight to have these chats with you earlier but they've been very valuable to me yeah thanks it's been a lot of fun um i'll tell you the thing i've been i'm most happy about about just putting this aside uh is that um i no longer have to argue with uh micah and trent about saying eth2 i'll be honest that has it has crossed my mind like like is this is this like a an eth2 battle of the brains where ben can't get away from e2 but the other guys you know the other folks in the

community because they give you too much crap about it um but forget the name the value is just and has been incredible forever so thank you for everything you do and that's that's not for me that's from you know the thousand i don't know how many people at least a thousand people a week who benefit from this newsletter yeah well as i said i'm not going anywhere i'll be around i'll be writing and uh i will pop up and i'll try and do the occasional special edition when anything uh interesting happens in the ecosystem um and uh yeah you you and i can keep chatting yeah i want to find that poep image uh i've lost it but uh i do plan to as soon as we get off this call well i probably have family responsibilities um but i do plan to

uh issue that as a po-app and i will include a link in the bottom of the description um just as a way to sort of celebrate your success as a community so it's it's been meaningful to all of us wonderful thank you all right i'm gonna stop recording