The Daily Gwei AMA Series #17 - 8th of January, 2023

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to the 17th episode of The Daily gray AMA Series where I answer questions from the daily grade Discord Community if you want to ask your questions for the next AMA you can ask them in the AMA series channel on the Discord Channel and if you want to go back and read all the questions as I'm answering them you can go do that as well the video will obviously have time stamps which you can check out too but without further Ado let's get into the questions so the first question here comes from Waka row who says Hey Anthony thanks for doing this I'll kick off the question for the next one from ethereum.org here wondering if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how we could continue to improve ethereum.org as a community resource especially with ether being Sunset curious if you've

noticed any gaps in the information on the site or have any suggestions for future content so I've been on record multiple times saying how much I love ethereum.org and it's kind of one of the reasons why ethub was sunset was because ethereum.org just became such an awesome resource there's a whole team on working on it it's obviously open source so people can go and contribute to it as they like and ether was really is something that was I guess like a bridge to that because back when we started ether we being Eric and I it was because ethereum.org was still very outdated but I would say ethereum.org has some of the if not the most up-to-date information on ethereum today I mean I can't think of another resource that is that has as much information about ethereum as ethereum.org has in saying that there

are always more things that the website could be adding now I don't know I haven't gone through every single page every single section and done like a detailed overview of the website but I think that branching out and maybe maybe you guys already do this but maybe branching out Beyond just the website and doing YouTube videos maybe doing a podcast maybe doing uh and doing videos on eips or teaming up with the ethereum cat herders and promoting them I think you guys already do this probably have your bases covered there but from my experience what people really want to do is they want to dive deeper into things they want to learn about the ethereum governance process you know exactly how it works ethereum is monetary policy how it came to be maybe stuff about the history of certain parts of ethereum would be good to add to the website as

well because there's a lot of history that I think people get lost on they don't understand why you know the ethereum is the way it is why why we're doing things like the roll-up Centric roadmap for example I think maybe adding some context around that would be valuable uh but in saying all of that as I said ethereum.org is already an amazing resource but I haven't gone through with a fine-tooth comb uh I guess like if anyone in the daily grade Discord channel has any uh answers for wackaro here about what could be added to the ethereum.org website that isn't already there uh be sure to tag them uh in the Discord Channel maybe in the ethereum uh Channel there uh and he'll probably uh he or she I don't actually know who who this is uh will be able to reply there all right moving on so

there's a couple of questions here from Merlot who is one of our resident accountants in the daily grade Discord channel so they start off by saying Vibe check do you see value in a suite of free educational content on crypto taxation being made available to the general public or do you think most people would prefer to rely on their trusted Tax Advisor uh to give them answers and do you think people would contribute funding to something like this so it's kind of hard to say because it really does vary uh greatly I guess like from Individual to individual from country to country but for me like just given my perspective here even if I had like all the information available to me I would still seek advice from a tax professional I would still go out there and ask them questions because I don't trust the information written down as

much as I trust the person telling me about these things now obviously my situation is is unique to me I I probably have a very different situation than than a lot of people in in crypto the way I I mean I'm in Australia right most people in crypto not in Australia I have various ways of um uh sorry I've set up my finances in various types of ways that probably other people haven't done so so it is a unique perspective that I'm giving here a giving from from my own perspective here uh but it but yeah in saying that I think that most people when they're looking at these resources they just want certainty they just want something to point to where they can you know in case they get audited or something where they can be like you know this is the guidance that

I was following and you're always going to feel safest when it's someone who is regarded as a tax professional for example giving you that advice and that goes beyond just advice on you know what to claim what not what you know what you can claim what you can't claim how this is treated you know how um this asset is created how this asset is traded for tax purposes it goes beyond that into the realm of how to optimize your tax right whether that be setting up different uh kind of things like trust to optimize your tax or how to tax lost Harvest uh the most in the most efficient way you know what to claim in the most efficient way how much to claim how to avoid uh kind of overstepping your bounds and increasing the chance of of an order increasing your risk of an audit and and basically

generally playing by the rules uh but making sure that you get what you're entitled to and you only pay what you're required to I think those are the biggest concerns people have uh but it will vary from Individual to individual and to answer your question after giving that I guess context there I think it's still valuable for for these resources to be made available especially actually if they've done on a I guess like country by country basis where they apply to the various jurisdictions uh and whether you know within that country uh or for that country itself um but I don't know if people contribute funding to this that's the thing like you could kind of Reason about this and say well if people are expected to contribute funding to this uh then what then maybe they would just spend that money on getting their own personalized

advice instead of funding something like general advice that everyone benefits from this is maybe maybe that's a selfish thing to say but I think that depending on how much it would cost to find something like this or how much it would cost to buy something like this it would have to be like a cost benefit analysis for a lot of people on this front uh but I do I do think it would still be valuable for people because I mean in my case I do look at the guidance online say I go to the Australian tax office website or the ATO website and I look at the guidance that they've given and I look at there's they've got a forum where they answer questions I look at that and I'm like okay well you know this seems uh legit you know this seems correct this is how

I think about it but there are other things where I see it and I'm like no I don't agree with this right and if I don't agree with that I have to go to a real person at my my tax accountant and say hey I don't agree with this for this in this reason uh is that I'll be able to do this as this and then if there is an audit later or if I get questions about about this uh can I back it up with with with this argument and obviously there are different ways of of doing that as well like there'll be simple questions that you get asked to justify things on but then uh if the ATO wanted to they could take me to court and I would have to defend my position there so it definitely gets very murky when you start going into that realm of

things but I think general advice is fine uh and and advice for the general public is fine but I just feel like most people would probably feel more comfortable talking to a person especially if it's not going to cost them a lot to do that because I mean it obviously costs can vary but if you're just wanting to go and to get like uh someone to do your taxes for you rather than you doing it yourself uh that doesn't cost too much to do right and it probably saves your ass and you can probably claim things you didn't think you could claim you probably save taxes in places you're doing that you would save taxes maybe you end up paying more than you you uh you owed because you missed stuff but even that's a positive because you don't want to be missing stuff right you want to be uh making

sure that your tax return or I guess like the taxes that you filed I should say are as accurate as humanly possible so that in case you get audited uh you are covered from that because one of the worst things that can happen is you get audited because it's guilty until proven innocent in that case you have to like if the tax office really wants to push it you have to prove to them why you aren't guilty basically uh and and in their eyes you are guilty uh depending on what kind of audit they do but if they literally say to you hey you know this is you know you have to explain this to us like this doesn't make any sense to us how did you buy this when you only claimed this much income for for the year right uh and they kind of

do that they do that a lot actually with um they do pattern matching and they they have their algorithms that they run they have their searches that they run uh obviously Merlot being a Tax Advisor would know this uh but yeah that hopefully that answers that question there with with a bunch of nuance of how I think about it and then you follow this up by later on by asking uh do you see new and existing crypto participants trusting an advisor such as an accountant and financial planner so let's start out to assist with asset custody now this is a funny topic because I don't think so at least personally I don't trust anyone with asset custody except myself and I have my own solution for this and I'm not going to tell people what the solution is obviously but I actually don't trust anyone but

myself to custody my assets um and and I guess like there are other things that people do like they give part of their seed phrase to the family member or they do social recovery stuff um but in my case I mean it's not that like maybe I should take a step back here it's not that I'm the only one custodying my assets but I do practice A self-custody in that it's not on a centralized exchange it's not uh in some centralized service it's not with a third party like a bank or something like that where they could unilaterally have control over it I my custody set up is is pretty involved and and it definitely uh obviously nothing's foolproof right uh but it definitely works for my needs and I think everyone can tailor one for their needs but yeah

I wouldn't trust any other third party like an accountant or a financial planner or a solicitor to custody of my asses I wouldn't even trust the bank I don't trust bank deposit boxes I sometimes get questions from my real life friends who say you know why don't you just keep your Ledger or your Hardware wallet in a um a bank safety deposit box I'm like well no like I know that they're in theory secure but in you know and in practice they're secure as well to an extent but still that's still trusting a third party and then they say well you put your seed phrase there I'm like no in no way am I gonna put my seed phrase in a bank deposit box where I have zero visibility over it uh unless I go there right like okay yeah the bank is relatively secure but it's still not

enough for me like I'm not going to put a seed phrase that has uh that has access to my funds into a bank safe deposit box this is not what I'm going to do but maybe other people are different here and and then it brings up the question of I guess uh how can this scale to the world like most people aren't going to do self-custody that's fine like I've always reiterated that's actually fine like I don't expect most people to do what I do but I personally just don't trust third parties to custody my assets for me and I think we have a lot of evidence from last year as to why this is the case right and why this should be the case for most people if you can if you have the means to self-custody your assets you should be doing that in my opinion and then Merle

you continued by saying uh you know by no means should they be holding a client's keys on their behalf but I can see a potential for them to be on a multi-sig on a client's nurses safe or a guardian on a client's urgent wallet this I agree with for sure if they don't have unilateral control over the assets then for sure like what I meant before when I was saying I wouldn't trust them I wouldn't trust my account and financial planner solicitor whoever with my seed phrase I wouldn't say to them hey you know keep this safe for me no way and I don't think you were saying that either but I figured that that was worth um clarifying for people but having them on a multi-sig that would be fine I think that'd be actually pretty cool because you could have for example your accountant on the multi C you could

have your I don't know if you trust your mum and dad you can have them on there or your siblings or your wife or husband whoever else right on there and then you know unless your wife could if you do like a two or three multi-seek for example and the three signers are your spouse your accountant and yourself unless your spouse and accountant colluded together to get that money off of you then you'd be fine right but but in in saying that like it gets murky because your spouse also has access to those funds as part of being married to you and you know so it starts getting like murky there and then your accountant maybe uh you know they run off with your funds there's always a risk running up I'm not trying to paint a picture of some uh some uh bad romantic comedy right but there was

always a risk there but you can do like a three or five multi-seek you don't have to do two or three where you could have like your best friend your spouse and your accountant and uh and and you on it right so they would have to they would all have to occlude against you for you to uh lose your funds there there's always a risk but yeah I think multi-cigs are great I think they're they're perfectly fine there are plenty of people in crypto who have lots and lots of money in crypto that use multi-cigs uh and it's been fine for them so so yeah I don't see any problems with that one but yeah hopefully that answers your questions Merlot moving on to the next one that comes from uh let me just scroll down here comes from cuz who says I plan to stake my eighth after

the Shanghai upgrade when withdrawals are activated but I definitely won't be able to place equipment at my home I travel all the time and my best option would be to buy myself a remote server so there are three questions here can I use a remote neurode such as Amazon service to become a validator I understand this is not ideal for decentralization in general um well yeah okay obviously it's not ideal for decentralization in general but if you are a frequent traveler and you are worried about uh your machine and not being able to access your machine at home uh in case of something like a power going out uh or your internet going out and you have to physically reset something at your plate at your home and no one else has access to that then yeah I mean using a remote service such as Amazon web services or

other cloud provider is totally fine as long as you understand the risk it's not just the decentralization hit that that that happens here it's also a custody risk because by having your validator on Amazon you your Amazon basically owns your validator so to speak right there's a custody risk there even though it's I mean it's a low custody risk obviously there's a low chance that Amazon's going to try and steal your assets or rug you but then you also run the risk of someone else actually says accessing your server because they've got access to your password for example got access to your account got access to it but even though you have 2fa on it so there's always that risk there um in saying that if you do have a way for someone to physically go to your home and reset something if it was

required then you can still stake from home because it's quite resilient so what I mean by this is that even if your internet goes down at your home and then just comes back up like 10 hours later your validator will still be running you'll it'll re-sync with your node it'll catch up to the head of the chain which shouldn't take long after even like a 24-hour outage and then your validator will keep ticking along you can set up alerts for this there are there are various websites that let you set up alerts to see what app you know what what happened if your internet went offline or if um you know your power went off obviously in the case of your power going off it's a bit more difficult unless you have some kind of setup that allows your PC to automatically uh restart itself uh and

that would and then it would require someone physically going there if you don't have that set up in order to switch on your PC and make sure it's all well and good uh but yeah generally even if you're traveling it's quite forgiving I mean I have traveled what's the longest I've traveled without uh sorry away from my node before I think it's two and a half weeks or something without my node and everything was fine my power didn't go out or anything but I have a an uninterruptable power supply as well and I have a backup internet connection but everything was fine my validator kept running all well and good but you can use a remote no that's that's totally fine and your second question I want to stake more than 32 at least 100 is it possible for solo validates to stake more than 32 and if

so how can I do it so you can stake more than 30 to 8 but doing so on a on a single validator is worthless doesn't actually do anything so each validator requires a minimum of 32 eighth but if you add more than that you can technically but it actually doesn't do anything it doesn't give you extra rewards your rewards are still going to be the same and it's basically dead eth so what you want to do is that if you have a hundred eight well you that doesn't divide exactly into 10 32 you'll be able to use and you'll be able to get three validators out of that with some eat left to spare but you would set up uh three validators with 32 each on them and then your eighth that you've got left over I mean you could stake it with a third party maybe you want to buy some

Reef or you want to buy some other LSD you could do that as well and it would technically be staking too uh but it wouldn't be solos taking obviously um and uh yeah that basically adding any more than 32 to a validator does nothing and it is it it's dead it would literally just sit there until we throws are enabled uh then you'll be able to to withdraw it but you'd have to from my understanding exit the whole validator which would cost you a time of getting rewards so you just don't want to do that so just send 32 8 to the deposit contract don't send any more than that when you're setting up your solo validators and thirdly if I can't become a solid sticker with remote server and to stake more than through tweet what do you think about our Eve how safe is that

and could it be a good alternative for someone like me who travels the world all the time I know about the R8 premium we'll assume I buy R8 when the premium drops so I think it's an excellent solution because rockapole really is the only decentralized LSD out there uh I mean disclaimer I run a rocker pool with six rockable mini pools I am an oh damn member so I'm a little bit biased here but I only did that because I really believe and trust rockapool uh that is actually decentralized that it's totally fine to stake with so yeah I mean if you don't want to use remote server if you don't want to be a solo Staker for any other number of reasons then I believe purchasing Arif is probably the next best solution if you don't want to run the hardware and and software yourself

uh and and I think it's the most decentralized solution out of all the other Solutions out there today so you can definitely do that but yeah hopefully that answers your question uh all of your questions there uh thanks for answering them they were great questions all right onto one from vedanton.ethia who says can you please walk us through a future state of how all these eight building blocks come together such as defy ens nfts Etc how will our web meta experience enhance due to this Innovation so the way these building blocks come together are the way they've already come together on ethereum so things like D5 protocols right the smart contracts they are the the building blocks they are the foundations that everything else is being built upon so your unisop for example is the foundation of most of the

swapping infrastructure that happens on defy so for example if you need to get if you so if you liquidate a position on RV and you want to swap out of those assets you're going to be using uh maybe you use unisoft directly but maybe you use an aggregator but you are going to most likely be using a uni swap liquidity pool which is a smart contract which is a building block there and that's that's obviously a core part of D5 and then uh you know things like ens I mean we already use these in our day-to-day lives if you want to send eth or any other token to someone you can get their ANS name and be easily send it to them without having to get their ethereum address off of them and then make sure it's the correct one copy paste it across you don't remember it

you know if you want to send Ace to me you can just send Ace to sasol.8 right and I'll get it and you know that that's tied to me uh because I verified that on on Twitter and I I can verify it on channel so I can sign a message if you really wanted proof that I own sasol.heath right and that acts as a building block to basically make it so that everyone on ethereum everyone who has an ethereum wallet is a and and everyone that interacts with layer twos as well can use their ANS names to do so instead of an ethereum address and the nfts I mean nfts benefit from D5 as well they benefit from all these building blocks you can send an nft to someone's in a s name instead of an ethereum address you can trade nfts or put nfts

up as collateral within defy all these work together uh in Tandem and because they're all built as a back end so to speak it as those foundations anyone can build whatever they want on top of it and can daisy chain these things together uh can build protocol their own protocol on top of it can can build a front end for example like anyone can build a front end on top of uni subcontracts anyone can build their own registrar for ANS from from my understanding and anyone can make their own nfts or make their own nft Marketplace obviously because the nft standard is an ERC standard just like the erc20 standard it's erc721 and ERC 1155 if I remember correctly uh and if and um and ANS is uh obviously following the nft standard because ens names are nfts as well there so in terms of like

enhancing our existing experience you know our existing metaverse and web experience I think that one of the biggest things is sign in with ethereum right like where we can basically have these existing web 2 Services allow you to authenticate with ethereum and then ethereum holds your data so to speak right hold your social graph and another example of this is all the uh that that exists in web3 are all the decentralized social media profiles or services or protocols I should say that allow you to sign in with ethereum sign in with your polygon address sign in with an L2 address which is I guess the same thing as your ethereum address and allow you to have your social graph tied to that instead of it tied to a centralized server and that really that's really

powerful like for example you can imagine a decentralized Twitter so let's say Twitter but decentralized instead of Twitter having a Twitter's database having all of your information on there your social graph on there all the algorithms on there what would happen is is that the uh all the social Gap staff would be tied to you it would be tied to your ethereum address it would be on chain and then you could bring that with you so say you didn't want to use the official Twitter front end you want to use another front end that Taps into the same uh social graph uh that the official for Twitter does but it's tapping into the social graph that you bring with you that means you can use different um Twitter interfaces because the back end is decentralized the back end is on chain and these Services could use

different algorithms they're not just uh have to they're not just forced to use Twitter's algorithm for example so all of this comes together and all these building blocks will come together to enhance that experience as well there but yeah there's plenty of other examples here but I don't want to spend too long uh naming through them all because I could go on for a while there but hopefully that answers your question uh there all right one here from uh G garbi who says is ethereum scaling on L1 out the window now or devs are researching some ways to do that too so it's not out the window it's just changed so traditionally or I guess like for for quite a while there was this notion of scaling ethereum layer one via sharding now this included splitting up the blockchain into 1024 different shards uh that would be able to scale

the blockchain 2024 uh times essentially right this was the understanding people had for quite a while but then as things went on as we got better at understanding how blockchains could scale ethereum switched to something called the roll-up Centric roadmap where essentially ethereum layer 1 is being built to serve Roll-Ups uh as as part of scaling ethereum so what this means is that sharding got changed into something called Dance sharding which has two parts to it there is Proto dank sharding and full dank sharding now the main difference between dang shining and the old world of sharding is that we're not splitting in the blockchain up into different parts anymore what we're doing is is we're doing data sharding only so it's just a place to store data on it doesn't do

execution of smart contracts for example uh and we're doing something called Data availability sampling on that where a subset of validator of data sorry can be validated by validators so not all the validators have to hold all the data at once but then you can sample that and be sure that the data is available now this is quite complex uh probably not doing the best a job of explaining this right now um but that is what we pivoted to basically that helps layer 2 scale because Layer Two is a very data hungry uh and all the execution of transactions is done at layer 2 instead of layer one now recently uh we came up with something called protodankshading which is going to hopefully be shipped this year later in the year and this is reference this is called erp4844 which

basically what it does is it allow it creates a new transaction type called blob type transact actions which which allows layer twos to use as space for their core data or I guess like for their data space right and what this does is it scales layer twos by up to 10 to 100 times in that initial rollout that we're doing for a Proto dank sharding here and basically means that the L1 is servicing the L2 so that blob space can only be accessed by these l2s or by these Roll-Ups it cannot be accessed by users on layer one uh by regular users on their one I should say there's a specific use for it so I would say that ethereum scaling on L1 is not out the window it's just servicing a different entity now it's not servicing the end User it's servicing layer twos

and then layer twos are servicing the end user so think of it like a business to business relationship ethereum is a business the layer two zero business ethereum talks to the layer twos it exports its block space to layer twos and layer 2s can buy a block space off of ethereum layer one and then layer twos are a business to Consumer so the layer twos sell its block space to Consumers and then that way the consumers get like much cheaper blocks Bay uh uh sorry much cheaper fees and you get to do all their execution stuff on layer two and then layer one became becomes the settlement layout for layer twos becomes this data availability layer for layer twos so hopefully that explains that there now that's on the sharding side of things there are definitely other upgrades coming to

layer one as well to scale it more which will have a side effect or byproduct of layer ones uh being uh sorry layer one being more scalable but still nowhere near a scalable is layer twos while also enhancing layer 2's scalability there but yeah you can go to l2beat.com to see all the layer twos if you want to but hopefully that answers your questions there all right a question here from the HD sync who asks hope you can help me find the answer for the following question what is a theoretical and practical maximum of ethereum network decentralization EG is it 1 million validators uh or full nodes what other constraints so I think we're talking about or quantifying decentralization it goes far beyond just the number of validators or

full nodes and I've talked about this a lot on the refuel before so I won't spend too much time on this but I'll give a high level overview of how I think about it basically there is two forms of decentralization or I guess technically three but two main buckets you have Technical decentralization and social decentralization and the third one is economic decentralization which I think is a subcategory of the first two categories but just for the sake of argument let's stick with the first two so technical decentralization is what you're talking about valid number of validators number of full nodes a number of different client implementations for example because we value client diversity and ethereum how easy it is to run a full node right what are the requirements uh how easy it is to run a validator all that you know how

geographically distributed it is all that good stuff there that's the technical decentralization side of things which I think ethereum does an excellent job on right does a fantastic job people can write I mean we could do better obviously but we do a really good job as a as compared to other chains and I think the only other chain that's easier to run than ethereum uh is really Bitcoin right and easier to participate in is Bitcoin because Bitcoin inherently is quite limited can't do what ethereum does it's not probably not even worth comparing the two but in terms of technical decentralization I would say that Bitcoin probably has this slight upper hand here right but that's what how I think of technical decentralization then you have social decentralization which is the social layer of ethereum what does ethereum's governance process look like is it just a cabal of like five people making these

decisions or is is it a Vibrant Community that come together and make decisions collectively uh on you know at every pro at every um phase of the governance process I think ethereum has a very strong social layer from that point of view but then it goes beyond governance it goes into things like what are the ethereum social layers uh principles what are their priorities like do we value open source yes do we value Freedom do we value uh uh the ability for anyone to transact on the Chain do we value censorship resistance I would say yes we're working on doing better on the censorship resistant front but I would say that yes we currently do so there are those two broad buckets Technical and and social decentralization and you're going to get uh biased and subjective view of both of those things there is no objective way

to measure measure uh most I guess like spokes of decentralization in my view and they're it's funny because you can actually even say that uh the the two the subcategory of both of those as I mentioned before is economic decentralization and when I talk about that it's more like okay what is the distribution of the token like how much eighth is in the hands of whales how much is it in the hands of VCS or how much is on exchanges how much is being put to use how much is staked right uh and what's the cost of attack on the network which as I said like it's an economic thing but falls into the technical aspect of it as well because there are different chains that have different costs of attack depending on their consensus mechanism depending on their makeup of how they look depending

on how many full nodes they have uh and validate is they have and all those sorts of things as well so that's how I broadly look at it and if you wanted to quantify that for every single chain it's quite hard to do because the ultimate test of Something's decentralization is a nation-state attack in my mind and ethereum is the closest thing is is sorry ethereum has come closest to being I guess quote unquote attacked by a nation-state with those ofak sanctions and ethereum's response has been amazing to it I mean yes about around 65 of the network is I guess like producing of fat compliant blocks because of Mev boost which I've talked about a lot before so I'm not going to rehash it there but there are 35 percent of blocks that will still process those transactions so ethereum

is still censorship resistant it is still fulfilling its promise here and we are working on getting that number down as much as possible and ethereum is really the only Network that has uh has been tested like that how well would Bitcoin fare in that environment we don't know how well would any of the other chains that far in that environment we don't know so we only really know uh with with ethereum right now and the ofak sanctions aren't really a concerted nation-state attack against ethereum because they're only sanctioned tornado cash they didn't sanction ethereum now let's say a government or the US government wants to sanction ethereum as a network could ethereum survive that if it did I mean it's debatable whether it would right now but if it could survive that right that would mean that ethereum truly is

decentralized that would to me be definitive proof that ethereum is decentralized now what does survive the uh you know US Government sanctioning the ethereum network itself mean well it means that the ethereum network runs just as it runs today or I guess like a little bit less uh well as it runs today but it still rides it's still Services users people are still getting the value out of it that they are today now would that be the case I don't think so I think that because I think the eighth price would absolutely tank right so there goes Economic Security at the window uh that would a lot of validators would go offline because they wouldn't allowed to be validating on the network anymore a lot of them are based in in the US right gone right unless they wanted to risk it which I don't think

they do because it's up to 30 years in prison or massive fines if you're a U.S citizen you definitely want to risk that developers in the US goodbye all the developers building on the protocol on the on the app layout goodbye they're not going to be there anymore unless they want to move countries which I I assume the majority of them probably don't want to do right and even if they do that they're still a US citizen so it's still legal for them to interact with ethereum um so yeah I mean and obviously any network can be sanctioned but if it by by any government but if the US government was to sanction ethereum I think the ethereum network would keep chugging but it would be a substantially different network than it is today and you could argue that ethereum is truly decentralized as a network in in you

know for for all intents and purposes but practically it doesn't really matter because most of ethereum's value has evaporated because of the the sanctions right so this is a very multi-faceted thing here this is as I said very subjective uh there's a lot of nuance here it depends on a lot of different factors but hopefully that has given you a I guess like answer that uh that you can that you can kind of get value out of so great question there the HD sync uh thanks for asking it all right we have a question here from Nick underscore BK who says I just recently tried Aztec Network for the first time it worked well it seems like a similar concept to tornado cash but more advanced I recall a while back on the daily where you mentioned privacy was a key area you'd be keeping your eye

on in 2022 and beyond my question is can you comment on Aztec how is it functional how its functionality compared to tornado cache and what is your overall take on the Privacy landscape and development within the ethereum ecosystem so there's a major difference between Aztec and tornado cash to another cache is a one-trick pony so to speak it does uh mixing of eth and and some other assets right you put Ethan other assets in it mixes it using ZK magic and then you get them out and it is incredibly hard if not impossible to trace those funds back to its origin address if you did it properly right so that's what Toyota cache is in a lot in a nutshell whereas Aztec is going beyond that what Aztec is doing is it's taking all transactions

that it can all interactions all different kind of like got defy things things like nfts things like just sending eighth and trying to add a privacy layer to it and the clearest example of this is something called Aztec connect which basically allows you to do the transaction on Aztec on the the roll up the Aztec roll up then Aztec will tap into layer 1 liquidity say you want to do a unisoft trade it will tap into unisop on layer one and then it will do the transaction privately at layer 2 so that you still get the benefit of unisop liquidity on layer one with the privacy on layer 2. now this is not something tornado cache does so another cache only mixes assets whereas Aztec will allow you to encrypt or put privacy onto any transaction on

potentially any transaction that you do so Aztec scope is much larger than tornado caches scope in saying that uh in terms of like what the the current privacy landscape looks like well there aren't that many privacy tools available to us today because of uh I guess like it's hard I mean privacy is quite hard to do right and also the sanctions of kind of put a chilling effect on that since Toyota cache got sanctioned in August of last year um but in but uh but I think on that note as well I'm very bullish on privacy still Aztec recently actually rebranded from you know saying the word privacy to saying the word encrypted which I think was a pretty smart Rebrand because even though encryption has been demonized by governments for the last 20 years it's

still a much less I guess like talk not toxic but much less loaded term than privacy is these days and that's just the way of the world it doesn't matter if it's right or wrong that's just the way it currently is so I think that Rebrand is cool Aztec have their own controls in place and their own monitoring in place in order to comply with any possible regulations so I think they've announced before they have their own uh controls on their that because they're the ones that running Aztec right now because Aztec as a network is centralized but they have their own controls for monitoring for things like money laundering and terrorism financing and all that all that other sort of stuff right so just be aware of of that too but I think when it comes to True privacy true decentralized privacy it's going to be an uphill battle from here

because we've already seen that governments do not like this the US government pretty much hated tornado cash because it allowed uh Rogue nation states like North Korea to wash their funds and that meant the US government meant the US government wasn't able to track them uh there's been a war on privacy and encryption as I said for the last 20 years especially because of the digital age and I think that there's a stigma around it as well but in saying all of that businesses need privacy businesses are not going to use these public networks unless they have guarantees that they are able to interact with their inner privacy preserving way in in an encrypted way which is something that Aztec is uh I guess like really building for and I think they're going to find a lot of success in that area for sure hopefully

that answers your question all right moving on to the next one coming here from DSi so they asked could it be possible to hack a blockchain with simple note infrastructure like let's say someone bootstraps millions of full nodes on a proof of work network but those nodes have malicious code that don't follow the correct rules I know when the proof of work the blockchain is the longest valid suits of blocks So in theory if someone wants to run a minor associated with millions of invalid nodes if this person proposes an invalid block for example moving coins I have an address without the correct signature it will be written on the blockchain wouldn't it uh no that's not how it works in proof of work or proof of stake so I'll just use the proof of work example because I think it's simpler here so in private work the canonical

chain is the chain with the longest accumulated proof of work on it so just because you're running millions of full nodes doesn't mean anything right you have to do the proof of work in order to become the head of the chain so for example if you only have like one Miner associated with it your accumulated proof of work would be very very low you wouldn't have more accumulated proof of work than the canonical chain the canonical Bitcoin chain for example so it wouldn't do anything now the way you would do it is that you would need to have 51 of the hash power of of Bitcoin you would need to build a a chain from a certain block maybe you change something in that block and then you would need to become What's called the heaviest chain to replace the existing chain and become the canonical one that the full nodes

agree on is the canonical chain right so you can't just do it by spinning up full nodes full nodes uh it have to be a comp sorry full nodes are not going to agree with your version of the chain because it does not have the most accumulated proof of work and it doesn't it is not the heaviest change so to speak so hopefully that answers that in terms of proof of stake networks I mean there are so many different flavors of proof of stake networks but in terms of how it works in ethereum proof of stake this was actually discussed quite a while uh quite a while ago in the initial designs something called a long range attack where how do you stop someone from forking the chain and then basically are staking their same eth on on that chain right so they have like a million uh Eve

Stakes just for an example here and that's 51 of the network how do you stop them from forking the chain and then how does the chain know that uh the the chain that that their Fork isn't the actual real chain uh because there's no proof of work right there's just uh there's just uh kind of like attestation of blocks uh and then there is finality after the 12.8 minutes or whatever 13.8 minutes whatever it is right so the way we deal with that is with slashing and slashing doesn't solve every issue because there's the issue of um of kind of like finality not uh uh not being Mets maybe because the most of the chain isn't attesting to the the blocks and then this chain splits off um but we handle that with both technical in protocol slashing and the possibility of

social slashing which I've explained a bunch on the refill before and the in protocol stuff as well is the finality Gadget so once it's finalized you if you try to I guess uh go back on History it would array is a crap ton of eight like 67 of eighth would be burned I think all of it gets burned or most of it gets burned uh if you try to do that uh so it's extremely economically costly to uh try and revert anything or to try and change anything after finality now during finality the cost is is lower but still it very costly to do so because you'd have to require the eight you'd have to cry the validators it gets gets very costly from there so they they're definitely differ and that's just ethereum improved mistake there are other proof of stake mechanisms that work very differently to that but that

is a general uh kind of gist there so hopefully that clears things up for you DSi all right a question here from El Coco No who says is the purpose of checkpoints on the polygon POS chain to basically finalize the chain up to that point to protect against realgs can you talk about this and explain a scenario in which the checkpoints give polygon an advantage over the evm side chains so I wouldn't say I'm an expert on this but from my best technical understanding of how this works the checkpoints will finalize the state of the chain to and but they can only be used to recreate the chain extra protocol if something was to go wrong with the polygon POS chain so what this means is that I believe there is no in protocol mechanism to go grab that checkpoint

from ethereum and use it to restart the chain it would have to be done manually by the polygon POS chain validators themselves so what they would do is that they would say okay we all agree that this checkpoint on ethereum is the last uh healthy checkpoint of the chain we're all going to start building on that checkpoint again right we're all going to start from that checkpoint um and that's how it would work uh that's because the chains are separate the polygon POS chain for all intensive purposes even though at checkpoints is functionally its own layer one it's not like a layer two on ethereum that relies on ethereum's validators and has its own validator set to do that so so I would say that it has a slight advantage over other evm chains but it's not like it has the same Advantage as a roll-up does

or a layer 2 on ethereum does and I would say it only marginally increases the security benefits of the polygon POS chain hopefully that clears that up for you but as I said I'm not a technical expert on that um but I think that's the way it works from my understanding all right a question here from 0x4a4c who says what is the cheapest most efficient way to go from Fiat in my track 5 bank account to Ether my Hardware wallet how can you optimize price uh uh I I've heard of some D5 services that will find the cheapest eth price for you across multiple exchanges how can you optimize fees from Fair conversion and wallet transfers what about set it and forget it ways to set up recurring buys transfer cheaply efficiently I'm curious what workflows people are using and how to improve mine

FYI I'm based in the US so this is going to vary obviously depending on what country you're in um depending on what exchange you use they have different fees depending on how comfortable you are with setting things like limit orders rather than doing the Classic Market Buy on an exchange so it's going to be hard for me to tell you exactly what the best way of going about it is for you I know that coinbase is retail uh I guess like buy and sell it has a lot of fees attached to it but coinbase pro has less fees attached to it or is fee free because you can set limit orders on there so I would you know you would use coinbase Pro instead of coinbase but there are other services that have less fees there are some that do flat dollar fees there are some that do percentage fees so

percentage fee would make uh uh probably more sense for a smaller buys but a flat dollar value would make sense for bigger Buys so really just just depends and you have to look at the different platforms and look at what fees they charge you in order to see but that's for Fiat to to eat or Fiat to another crypto and in terms of crypto decrypto on chain I would say you have two main things to consider or three actually you have the gas fees you have the protocol fee so for unisop at 0.3 for most pools on other amms it might be less than that and then you have the slippage that you would incur so the difference between these is that the gas fee is paid to the ethereum network whether you're on ethereum layer one or ethereum Layer Two

that gas fee is paid to the ethereum network ultimately there or at least most of it is um on layer twos right and some of it goes to the layer two sequences uh so you have to consider that fee then you have to consider the protocol fee so as I said unusop is 0.3 flat fee you can't get around that on uni swap for most pools that's what the liquidity providers are set up to charge that's what you're going to be charged as a flat percentage fee on that and then slippage so say the token that you're trading uh has a very low liquidity say you want to buy a thousand dollars worth of it and you're going to incur two percent slippage that means that you are going to lose two percent of your uh value instantly so that's two percent there point three percent on the

uni Stop Trade that's 2.3 percent uh that you're losing to fee slippage and then on top of that you have the gas fees to consider which aren't a percentage thing it's a it's a dollar value thing and they can vary obviously depending on what network you're using and depending on uh you know what what gas what the gas price is at the time uh and uh and also depending on the I mean if you're measuring in dollar value depending on the dollar value of of each as well right so those are all the things you have to consider in terms of the most efficient way here I would suggest using a decentralized exchange aggregator such as uh matcha or one inch but then I would even say you could air even further and use something called Cal swap or cow protocol which is Mev which protects you against Mev which

gives you even better um an even better feel on your order and I've used color swap a lot recently and they've been excellent I've been very very happy with the service there so I would say that cow swap is probably your best bet for most efficient swaps but one engine matcha and other aggregators like slingshot as well uh they're just fine too but but yeah that's been my experience there but in terms of Fiat to crypto it's going to vary depending where you are in the world and depending on what which which exchange you use uh for sure all right a question here from Ripper doc who says my question is which conference or conferences are the best to attend for enthusiasts not necessarily the builders developers or VCS so from my experience in terms of ethereum conferences themselves for enthusiasts I would say East Denver uh

uh eth connect or sorry Dev connect I should say uh and and um uh and Devcon itself so devconnect and Dev Corner run by the ethereum foundation East Denver is run by the eat Denver people I think this the spork dial they're calling themselves these days um but there are a bunch of other smaller events that are run through 8th Global which definitely are more on the Builder side of things but the larger youth Global events uh uh they definitely um uh cater more towards uh enthusiasts as well uh but then there are there are other events like permissionless that bankless runs which are probably much more Enthusiast driven than Builder driven and then there are other cryptos wider crypto events that are less

focusing on the builders and developers and more enthusiasts but your mileage may vary because some of them are just chill fests you know some of them are nft specific for example some of them are specific to other things like d file web3 but in terms of like a broad ethereum based conferences East Denver Dev connect Devcon and some of the 8th Global events depending on where they are in the world depending on on the size of it uh I would suggest going to and in saying that I mean I'm going to be at Ethan bar I don't know where Dev connect and Devcon are yet but I'm hoping to get out to at least one of those um and I may may be at permissionless it just depends if the dates work out for me and that's I believe going to be in September this year uh and that's run by

bankless and block Works uh but yeah other than that like I tend to avoid most conferences I'm not because they're not good but because I'm not a builder or developer not a hacker or anything I don't participate in the hackathons and also traveling from Australia can be quite exhausting uh especially to places like Europe and the US so so yeah hopefully that answers your question there Ripper doc right on to the next one from Destroyer who asked do blockchain projects definitely have uh generally have sdets working on them and do they test Automation and CI CD I actually don't know what an sdet is uh I'm going to assume I'm just Googling it now software development Engineering in test uh which I guess is something to do with testing this is a developer

question I think Destroyer unfortunately I'm not a developer so I can't really answer this but I would say that anything that you're used to in the web 2 world when it comes to this sort of stuff would translate over into the web 3 world because it's just code editing the day doesn't matter if it's decentralized or centralized code it's the same it's it's still code still needs to be tested still needs it still needs to run through automation platforms and still needs to have devops behind it and it may be different to how you do it in web 2 because of the decentralization uh uh things to consider but it's still very similar from my understanding but maybe you can ask in the developers channel in the Discord Channel and you'll probably get a better answer there than I can give you right one here from a j Mill es who says

you often talk about the discount for lsd's trade to eighth but R8 actually trades at a premium if I'm not I'm not mistaken could you talk about why maybe some Advanced advantages I love rocket pool but that's a pretty significant hit to potential gains so the reason why there's a premium is because people want Ari basically like that's that's the really short and sweet of it there's more people that want re than there is re Supply available so there is a premium Now where the opportunity lies here is in People spinning up mini pools so for example a mini pool requires 16 eighth and about a hundred uh RPL to spin up but if you spin up a mini pool using something called Rocket ARB you are able to actually ARB that premium and get the reward for yourself so I've done this

five times so I set up six mini pools the first one I didn't do it on but I've done it five times with rocket ARB and I've gotten on average 0.33 eighth three eighth for doing that ARB there now that ARB has remained because there is so much demand because the uh the staking pool is full it has a limit of 5 000 eth in there and it's full right now so how does that come down well more people need to spin up mini pools which will mince more re which will uh make the re premium go down uh and that will happen over time especially I believe post withdrawals so I understand that uh that this kind of like limits uh The Rocker pool growth because people don't want to buy RF if it's at a premium uh but there is also other Solutions coming as well

not just withdrawals they're like they're going to be lowering the amount of eth that is required for mini pools so it can become more Capital efficient for RAF to be minted so this is going to go down I believe in February to 18th instead of 16th per mini pool and then hopefully down to four eighth per mini pool which will yield a lot more efficient R8 minting which will allow RF to come back to parity instead of trading at a premium and allow rocketpool to scale better and re to scale better so hopefully that answers your question but if you want to ask more more about this specifically I highly recommend joining the rock Apple disco Channel they are very very helpful there and they'll be happy to answer any questions you have about rockapool right another one here from Destroyer who asked do you think that any tokens

on ethereum could accrue value in a similar way that eath does maybe L2 tokens so I generally don't give investment advice and I generally don't talk about tokens other than eighth for maybe obvious reasons I don't want to be seen as giving the investment advice I don't want to be seen as Shilling any particular token I have positions and tokens other than eth I'm an angel investor on a lot of different projects so it's very hard for me to talk you know in an unbiased way about tokens um but in terms of saying that it can accrue value in a similar way that Eve does I don't actually see any other token doing that and I I can safely say that because eth is such a unique and amazing asset and it has worked so long and so hard to get to that point that I

believe it's going to be extremely hard if not impossible for pretty much any token to get to that point now the major reason why I say this is because eth is a store of value that has a monetary premium most assets doesn't matter if it's a blockchain based asset or a digital asset doesn't matter if it's an nft doesn't matter if it's a real world asset doesn't matter if it is a real world commodity or currency will never achieve a monetary premium or restore a value status because they there's simply not enough room to have you know 100 different stores of value in the world because that would dilute each of them right and they would just share value across of them across them they can only be a handful of them that exist in the world in crypto there are only two BTC and eth the rest of the assets are not

story values they do not have much monetary premium if any at all and most of them are not even tied to an entire ecosystem like eth is most of them are an app token or a layer 2 token so so from that perspective they will never accrue as much value as eth in my opinion so a useful analogy here is something like the US right the US has the US dollar and it has companies within the US that um that uh have their own you know stock tied to them my old publicly traded stock or equity and that's worth a lot less than the US dollar in terms of market cap but in saying that as well the US dollar is not a store of a good story value because it loses value over time and these a company at the stock

prices go up over time but in terms of just looking at it as a total market cap thing the US dollar has a much greater market cap than any of the of the um of the businesses in that that work in the US right that exist in the US so it's a crude analogy it's not a Perfect Analogy because as I said US dollar is not a store of value it has a monetary premium because US dollars are accepted everywhere people want US dollars but it is not a story value because it loses value against everything else over time well not everything else but like a lot of a lot of other assets over time but it is the best fiat currency today that exists today right because it loses value uh sorry other Fiat currencies lose value against it over time uh and the US dollar is is a pretty good sorry

has a lot of monetary premium because of the fact that it is a global Reserve currency so that's a crude analogy there so from taking that point of view I don't think any asset is going to accrue value the way eth has in saying that that does not mean that ether is going to be the best investment going forward depending on what your investment goals are if your investment goals are wealth preservation and now I'm giving investment advice this is not investment advice right this sounds like investment advice but it's not this is just how I view things I'm not telling you what you should or shouldn't do it's going to be very clear on that but the way I view things if your goal is wealth preservation then you are not going to be doing DJ and stuff right you're not going to be yellowing all your money

into some random D5 protocol or some random nft hoping that you get 100 x out of it you're going to be trying to preserve that wealth now that could become in the form of a buying eth that could come in the form of buying real estate buying stocks or buying less risky assets even though you know the growth isn't going to be 100 x from there or even 10x right over a shorter period of time even though you know it's going to just grow your wealth uh well hopefully grow your wealth slowly over time you do it because you want to preserve the wealth you already have now if you are someone who doesn't have much well to preserve if you are just starting out in your investment Journey well then it doesn't really make much sense for you to go into wealth preserving assets uh because you have

better more of a risk appetite right you can afford to lose more uh your your small amount of money that you're putting into it for the chance of getting 100x so let's put some dollar values here if you have a million dollars right and you've worked your way up to a million dollars are you going to risk that million dollars that you've worked your way up to by yellowing it into things that give you 100 x no most people aren't going to do that right I'll give you a potential for 100x right yeah okay you can make 100 million dollars but how much risk you taking are you gonna hold it for until you get to 100 million dollars no you're probably not right there's there's a lot of different things that go into this but just as a simple kind of answer here that million dollars you're most likely

going to put that into something that preserves your wealth now you don't have to do all of it maybe you only do 80 of it and you use 20 on your dgen gambling stuff that you want to do to grow that well that's fine but you're probably going to put the majority into something that you think and you have relative confidence in that is going to preserve that wealth now let's say you have ten thousand dollars well you're not probably and you're young I mean this this is an age thing as well because as you get older maybe you have a family maybe you have uh more commitments like a mortgage let's say you're under 30 years old you don't have a mortgage you don't have a family which I mean under 125 obviously applies more to but under 30 I think there's a large chunk of

people that do that and say you have ten thousand dollars you want to play with well in that case you're not going to be preserving your wealth you're going to be like well I need to generate wealthier so you're going to be taking riskier and riskier Bets yes your chance of blowing up is a lot higher uh yes your chance of of making it uh getting that 100x is quite low but you're still going to do that because that is the way that you think or that you believe is a way to grow wealth uh much you know in a much quicker way than you would putting it into a wealth preservation asset right so from that point of view you can other other tokens can easily outperform eth over time but it's a lot riskier you're not you know you're not going to pick the winning one most of the time

and uh it depends on your situation so for me as it exists today I'm not doing those YOLO bets anymore in any kind of size definitely not most of my wealth is in eth because I believe that eth is a great way to preserve my wealth now that's my crypto wealth or I guess like what's in crypto I also have my house I have like a car right a car is not a story of value but I have other assets that are not crypto that I'm using to preserve wealth so it just depends what you want to do depends on your level of wealth depends on your risk appetite depends on your commitments uh I mean I don't have a family but still I plan to have a family relatively soon hopefully right so I don't want to be yellowing to things and

be like oh God I just lost all my money what am I going to feed my kids right so there's that to consider and everyone's situation is different that's why I say I'm never giving investment advice I'm not an investment advisor and you have to really consider your own situation so hopefully that answers your question uh there I'm going to move on to the next one here from I'm Aaron who says is the fact that internet providers slash Telecom providers control the ability to access the internet a looming long-term centralization concern for you how can we decentralize internet access before the Telecom monopolies can sense out industry so this is a bit of an alpha in the room I think that generally internet providers are quite decentralized across the globe in terms of how many there are right but when you look at a nation in a

vacuum they generally only have a handful of major Telecom providers in Australia for the longest time we only really had uh one called Telstra which was very dominant and then we switched to something called the NBN Network which marginally improved competition but still it's just a handful right of companies that controlled this year and then when you're talking about the actual infrastructure itself I mean it depends if it's government owned right it depends if it's it's uh it's uh it's public it's owned by private companies and you know how many of the private companies own it there's a lot of nuance there but it is still the elephant in the room it is still a big centralization vector and the way we Rectify this well it's very hard because decentralizing infrastructure is quite difficult so let's take something like

Elon Musk starlink for example that is an alternative to the in to the telcos you have in your country you can hook up to starlink uh and get access to it but that starlink is still controlled by Elon Musk Elon Musk is still at the mercy of the US government if the US government told Elon Musk to do something with starlink uh by a legal order he would probably have to follow it he probably would right and and even if he wanted to do it himself right if he wanted to cut off access to some country because he just felt like it he could do that as well so decentralizing infrastructure is very very hard if not impossible rolling out infrastructure at scale is extremely difficult and that's why it can't really be decentralized thing I know there are some projects

that are trying to focus on uh trying to do this like helium for example but helium their main incentive was that you could quote unquote mine with the helium box boxes and earn tokens for it but then that relies on the tokens being valuable to drive demand for the helium boxes because if the helium boxes cost let's say 400 and you can't even recoup the cost because the token price is so low or because uh too many people are on the network are trying to earn the rewards and it's diluted your share well then people most people aren't going to buy that box because there's no incentive for them to do so so an infrastructure rollout whether it's centralized or decentralized is incredibly costly but a decentralized one is even more costly because of the fact that you need the incentive there and you need the incentive people to

want to provide that uh provide that at scale so yeah hopefully that answers uh a bit of your question there as I said it is an elephant in the room there's no good fix here uh really at the end of the day we just need to kind of uh uh accept that this is a potential risk this is one way nation states can control the chain and work towards I guess just making people more knowledgeable about this and also maybe doing stuff in your own country maybe voting in governments that will work to break up any kind of monopolies that exist on Telecom providers making sure that they do things that encourage competition for them and maybe even uh to a point where the the government doesn't own all the infrastructure either right I mean technically if you really wanted to go

to the end state of this uh the if the US government wanted to I mean they control the army they could just tell the Telecom providers hey you know all of your infrastructure are belong to us if you disagree we're going to throw you in jail if you try to fight back we're just going to squash you with our army like I'm talking about the the extreme here so when you're looking at like physical infrastructure it's much harder to decentralize that than it is software in in my opinion because software yes it lives on physical infrastructure but the software that ethereum lives on like having a full node anyone can have that on a solid state drive anywhere in the world uh and and just I mean I mean there's lots of different solar State Drive providers but no one has access access over that drive that you have

locally on your own physical machine unless they hack you right unless they come into your home but it'd be impossible for that for I guess like millions or full nodes for example to be seized or even tens of thousands to be to be um I guess like found in Seas even if they were people around the world could just spin up new ones it's very easy to do that because it's software rather than Hardware uh based um and yeah hopefully that answers your question I went off a little bit of a tangent there but uh I I think that answered the question all right we have one here from dfern.eth who asked do you have any perspectives on the cosmos ecosystem ethereum people and Cosmos people seem to get along quite well without the kind of combat scene between Ethan other ethereum killer alt l1s if

my perception is increased it is correct why do you think this what do you think this is well okay I think Cosmos is more friendly than the other ecosystems but I don't think that Cosmos and ethereum really get along that well Cosmos fundamentally is being built in a way that disagrees with the ethereum vision Cosmos wants a central hub with uh all Sovereign chains hanging off of it whereas ethereum is the central hub for layer twos which aren't Sovereign chains layer twos are inheriting ethereum security so it's a very very different model to Cosmos Cosmos wants every one of their spokes to be Sovereign to have their own token to uh secure themselves to be able to do what they want whereas ethereum doesn't believe that that is actually scalable doesn't believe that's

the right way of um of of scaling a blockchain they believe that we should have Roll-Ups but they're these Roll-Ups don't shouldn't be Sovereign they should just tap into ethereum security to get all the benefits of that to appendo theme's validator set to get in to get all the benefits off of that so my general perspective on the cosmos ecosystem is that I'm bearish on it like I'm not very bullish on it all I think it's an inferior ecosystem to ethereum by far I think it's inferior technically because it's I believe in the ethereum roll-up Centric roadmap and I believe that there are perverse incentives like there's a reason why the atom token hasn't accrued much value and for example Terra was built on Cosmos technology but Adam didn't grow any value the lunar token accrued all the

value from the growth of Terror so there is that as well whereas a layer 2 on ethereum properly constructed as a roll-up it doesn't leech value from ethereum because it still pays ethereum for its security it still uses ethereum as a asset on there as a unit of account as a fee token it's still uh the same set of users ethereum users are layer 2 users and Layer Two users are ethereum users so hopefully that explains uh that one there all right on to the next question from Noe one who says can you briefly outline discuss discuss ethereum governance recently during a discussion I had I couldn't comprehensively rebut the accusation that eth was mainly governed by a team of devs as either conform or Fork would value your thoughts and ways if we if any we could improve so the ethereum governance

process is quite involved uh it's mainly captured by something called the EIP process or the ethereum Improvement proposal process so when any change is made to the ethereum network it has to go through this EIP process first and this Erp process has a bunch of different stages which you can go and look up on the ethereum.org website if you want I don't know all of them off the top of my head but basically the high level overview of how this process works is that someone comes along and says hey you know this is my idea this is the EIP that I've created with the uh I guess like details of this IDR and then they work through that and work through the different stages to get that to mainnet it is a long process to get it to mainnet it doesn't just happen overnight it requires a lot of work both

on the research and development side as well as the governance side now to give you some examples of how things get accepted or rejected so there is an Infamous EIP which is Erp triple nine which was submitted by a court of Art Bar called afri R3 sorry I should say who worked on the parity ethereum client before parody was sunset back in I believe 2018 or 2019 where the Erp suggested unfreezing uh some amount of eth I think was 300 000 Ethan probably more than that that was Frozen as part of the parity multi-sig bug where essentially these funds were frozen forever because someone deleted a library contract that was needed by this contract by the multi-sig in order for

people to be able to access their funds there now 300 000 of that eth actually belonged to uh parody's sister a company called the web3 foundation which was building polka dot which is something parody was heavily involved in now at the time when this Erp was submitted people were like well no straight away as soon as we saw the EIP the governance process started from there the ethereum community was like no this doesn't make any sense this is a slippery slope if we unfreeze These funds that means we have to pretty much go back and do the chain and freeze everyone's funds and it becomes very subjective do we uh do we reverse hacks because of this or other hacks because of this do we unfreeze funds that people sent uh to to the burn address do we unfreeze funds that were

that were sent uh to the burn address as a means of sending them there in order to delete them forever right and there's all these other subjective stuff that comes into it so even before this EIP entered any kind of like research or development phase uh the social governance stepped in and basically said no and that the the social governance is the ethereum community itself it includes everyone in the ethereum community whether they just be casual community members whether they be core developers and researchers infrastructure providers other stakeholders like exchanges none of them really chimed into this but it was really the core ethereum community that just outright rejected this before it even got off the ground basically said no right so that was rejected now let's say it wasn't rejected at that stage let's say it went through the research and development phase as time went on

and it got to the point where it was slated for inclusion and the community was still saying basically no we don't want this this actually happened with something called prog power where essentially it got to the some of the final stages of getting included in on the ethereum main net um but then it did it because social governance got really loud about this it got to the point where social governance was like we don't want this at all right this is not something that is going to benefit the ethereum network we believe that there are perverse incentives here we believe that the rebacco deals going on we don't believe Prague power is an upgrade that should come to the ethereum network and ultimately it was decided by the community that this was not going to happen the people that were supporting it even in the the core Dev Arena who I

would say have I mean they're not they don't control the chain but they do have more influence than just your casual community remember because they are core developers right they do have uh more of a say they don't have Merit to their words even they back down because they're like you know this is this is not popular enough in the community this is not something the community wants so this is not something that we feel comfortable supporting anymore and even if they did feel comfortable supporting it even if they all wanted to just push it through even though the community didn't want it the community and the people running the infrastructure and the full nodes don't have to adopt this code they can basically say we're not going to run the code that contains this upgrade because we do not believe that this is uh something that the the

community wants this is not something that myself as a node Runner or as a minor whereas a Staker once in the network and you can run the software that is the last line of defense if all else fails but that but to get to that point takes a lot of work right and it takes basically if you wanted to get something pushed in to the network you would have to convince over 51 of the full nodes to upgrade to this and if the majority of the community is against that then you will never convince the the um the full nodes to include this and even if the court developers wanted to happen it wouldn't happen so that is the the governance process in a nutshell from a high level overview there of how things work how things have been stopped and how things have gotten really far

and been stopped and what what happened if things had gotten so far to the point where it was slated for inclusion and then people just didn't run the nodes and then it just wouldn't get included on the network the network rules would not change because it didn't go through a network upgrade or a hard fork or if it did only say only like 20 of the nodes were upgraded then that they would Fork off and that wouldn't actually be the real ethereum chain the real ethereum chain would be what the community said it was would be the 80 so that's how it works from that perspective in saying all of that even the most popular upgrades take a long time to come to the network erp1559 the most popular ethereum upgrade by far besides the merge took two and a half years to get into the

network right two and a half years and I can't stress how popular this was literally everyone in the ethereum community wanted this there was probably maybe five percent if I had to put a percentage on it of people that didn't want this and guess who those people were miners why didn't miners want this because it cut directly into their profit margins so we can just do a one-to-one mapping there of why they didn't want it there's no uh there's no kind of like a shady back room deals being done here there is no guessing here we know exactly why miners didn't want it because it hurt their bottom line but other than that everyone wanted it still took two and a half years right the merge everyone wanted a proof of mistake since day one still took an extremely long time to get into the

network right so when looking at things when looking at how to change the ethereum or like change the ethereum protocol rules it is an extremely involved process it takes a lot of move a lot of input from a lot of different people there are a lot of moving Parts here and if all else fails every single other stage fails and the upgrade gets coded up it gets put out there then people can just simply say I don't want to run this software and that's it it wouldn't happen the chain wouldn't upgrade the chain would be the same all ethereum we're used to without that upgrade included and then we'd have to deal with the Fallout from that right there'd be social Fallout but the ethereum network wouldn't change it would still be the same ethereum network that the community wanted to stay on and the community are all loved but yeah

hopefully that answers your question no you want I know it can be complex but this is exactly how it works in Bitcoin as well it's just that Bitcoin doesn't want to do any upgrades on its Network so with ethereum we don't do that we do want to do upgrades so there is a precedent to upgrading and there are there is a governance process that needs to be adhered to but this is the same in Bitcoin the Bitcoin core developers could tomorrow code up a change to bitcoin push it to the to the branch and then the Bitcoin uh users or node Runners could decide or the community could decide on whether they wanted to actually go through with this or not the same way the ethereum users do all right some questions here from shoreman who asks question about the ultrasound money site the only section I

don't understand appears to be the most important with respect to the ether long-term price is the monetary premium I see gold is estimated at 10 in the chart how is that calculated how can we calculate track ether's monetary premium so a monetary premium is quite a debated thing in in the world my definition of it is an asset that has a strong Network effect but also has a way to accrue value from that Network effect so a asset that has a monetary premium that is not a store of value I think these things go hand in hand is the US dollar the US dollar doesn't accrue value into itself right but it accrues value for the US which is what it's supposed to do

whereas the eighth as an asset a cruise value uh to itself from its monetary premium from its Network effect from its use in defy it's used as money it's use in staking its use and as that use usage grows as an asset accrues that value and then that passes that value to the ethereum network whereas the US dollar doesn't it doesn't um even though it has a monetary premium it because of its Network effect it doesn't hold that's value it drives that value back to the US government back to the us as an entity and the US dollar obviously has value as a reserve currency and a stomach effect keeps growing but it loses value against uh against like other assets over time because of its

inflationary nature right so and because of its uh not just inflationary nature but because of the fact that US dollars are not saying people want to hold they want to use it as money right they want to spend it uh it has a very very high velocity it moves very like it changes hands a lot whereas eth maybe necessarily doesn't do that right because it's used in a bunch of different ways as I outlined so that's my own subjective view of things and I think ultrasound money the website has its own view of this as well uh but in the reason why gold is it has such a large monetary premium is because gold has a massive Network effect right that's that's built up over thousands of years and it also has is also like eth where it its Network effect brings value to itself and it increases its monetary

premium which all which uh it makes it a story of value as well whereas the US dollar is not a very good story value has a strong monetary premium so in my eyes those two go hand in hand that's why gold is rated so highly but I mean I obviously think Eve is a better asset than gold so I think that eighth should be worth more than gold and 8 should be uh uh should have a high score like gold but eighth needs to have more of a network effect it needs to have nation states uh buying it right and storing their value in it that is really the the thing that it needs because to beat gold because gold obviously is held by nation states they collect it they keep it in their own vaults whereas if one day eth is and I'm not talking about like uh

small nation states like El Salvador with Bitcoin uh being on their balance I'm talking about like big nation states ones that have huge economies right that let's say the top 10 uh Nations say the top 10 economies in the world if they started putting Heath on their balance sheet you bet your ass is monetary premium is going way up and its store value uh properties are going way up as well and it's going to get closer to gold in terms of its score yeah all right your second question uh regarding lsds I do believe they will follow a parallel distribution where the top LSD takes 80 plus market share long term if so has an uh later already won so I struggled to answer this question because it's hard to say and there's not really a precedent here so right now if

you look at the way lsds and the LSD market share is as you mentioned Lido or it already has a very large market share you could say that it's a winner take most Market but I don't think it works out like that long term I think that there are going to be a handful of big players I think lighter will be one of them I think that rocketpool will obviously be one of them but then you can look at the exchanges like coinbase and binance that have their own lsds as well and then if you count those as lsds right then Lido's market share isn't actually that big compared because these exchanges have lots of each stake with them so I think the line between uh you know pure lsds and exchanges with with um with

lsds is blurred now and I think that you have to basically lump all staking services that have an LSD attached to it as an LSD service so from that perspective it already isn't a power law but if you want uh to take just pure lsds like Lido like rocket pool like a couple of others out there then yeah Lido has the biggest market share right now but that's because it had a big head start it's because withdrawals unenabled and I believe longer term one once withdrawals are enabled we're going to see a much healthier ecosystem there I believe that once rockable becomes more efficient we're going to see a better ecosystem there we're going to see better growth with rocket pool but the way I look at it is that lsds and centralized exchanges or centralized

service staking providers are very blurred because when you look about look at it later yeah okay it's 29 different operators but they're all centralized right later is just the entity that sits above it um and then from that perspective lato the LSD looks looks very much like um a centralized exchange except it just distributes its Stakeout but then it depends on what those where those operators are you know how detached they are from each other how independent they are from each other and yeah I mean it gets very murky from there gets very uh nuanced from there but hopefully that gives you my view of things all right another question here from videntin.eth who says Anthony do you get approached to participate in other crypto podcasts out there haven't seen you on others except Bank list do you

avoid many of these podcasts on purpose you have a strong voice and it'll be great for you in ethereum to share your perspectives on other well-known podcasts such as Unchained and Empire amongst others so I have been approached by other ones in the past and I've been on other ones other than bankless uh in the past as well I mean I recently was on whack whack attacks rocker fuel I've been on altcoin daily before I've even been on Ivan van Tech's uh podcast before or YouTube channel before um but yeah I mostly have been on just bankless uh and obviously daily way um and not on too many others I haven't been approached by Unchained and Empire yet not that I know of at least but I would go on on Unchained an Empire but in saying that there are a lot of ones that I avoid I avoid most of the crypto

YouTubers um for example I probably wouldn't return to Ivan on text Channel um altcoin daily look it's it's kind of a fine line because pretty much all of them do the same thing right they play the algorithm they do the click bait they show tokens but they have a lot of reach and the old coin daily folks are actually really friendly I like talking to them both I I really I I I thought the conversation was really great but they definitely are slaves to the algorithm right and I I don't fault them for that that's just the way things are um but people have nuanced views here and and me being me and me being I guess as uh I protect active of my reputation as I am I just don't feel too comfortable going on many of them I'm

happy to go on Bank list because I believe bankless is aligned with my values I believe David and Ryan are absolutely awesome but the majority of podcasts out there I probably wouldn't ever go on I know it would be good for reach and would be good for educating the masses but I would take a reputation hit for doing it for example if I went on bit boy's Channel I would take a massive reputation here I would feel gross doing it and but in saying that he has a massive reach I'd reach new people and maybe guide them to maybe get them onto a daily way where they can actually learn the proper things about crypto without being Shield tokens but I don't think it's worth the reputation hit for me I don't think it's worth me feeling like about it because we don't I would honestly regret it straight away

and I'd feel disgusting doing it because I have zero respect for bit boy I think he's one of the worst actors in this space but yeah I mean it would be good for reach right it'd be good for reaching new people but that's the fine line that I have to unfortunately tread oh fortunately and that's just the way I view things all right uh one here from Este bennu hopefully I said that name right so hey Anthony how do we ensure that the usability of ethereum as an ecosystem uh especially l2s doesn't suffer due to fragmentation things such as the need to bridge between l2s and Scattered liquidity seems like bad user experience how can we inter interconnect these layers better and Abstract the infrastructure away so we end up just using ethereum again I think that it'll all be extracted Away by The Front Ends

by the wallets that build on top of the protocols that do the abstraction such as the bridges between these different l2s and then when we have things like um uh Proto dank sharding uh or dank sharding uh on on ethereum layer one you'll be able to do cross roll-up communication atomically right um but in saying that I think the crypto ecosystem has over obsessed about Atomic transactions and composability the web as it exists today like web2 doesn't actually work like that web 2 is very asynchronous so synchron synchronous means that things happen at the same time asynchronous means that things happen in um in a linear fashion where

basically you say hey I want to do a thing and then you wait like five seconds and get a reply from the other side says okay you can do the thing and then that that replies to you I mean this is exactly how the internet works and there's there's an act to it there's an acknowledgment when you send a ping then it pings you back it's very it's very asynchronous right rather than synchronous and I think in crypto we've been spoiled with synchron with synchronous transactions and composable composability that stems off of that but things can be built in a way where it's a composability and and synchrony is not assumed and you can do them in an asynchronous way where essentially for example you could uh do a transaction from uh arbitrim you could say hey I want to buy this token on uni swap but I

want to do it from arbitrim uh but sorry I want to buy this token on uniswap that's on optimism but I want to do it from arbitrim well you can do a thing uh asynchronously you know do an async transaction where essentially arbitrim says okay initiating transaction to the uh I guess like uni swap or through a bridge for example through hop for example uh do the Hop transaction then the Hop transaction gets uh finalized on optimism then optimism gets the message and says okay I'm gonna do the swap on unisop and then it does the Swap and then once that's completed the the optimism Network gets the message again and says hey send this these assets to back through hop to arbitrim to this user and then all those steps happen in

an asynchronous fashion but the end result is still the same so maybe you have to wait a minute for this to happen I don't know it's hard with finality as well because it depends on the bridging it depends on what the Roll-Ups allow for but say you just wait a minute for that transaction to finalize that's still the same experience that you would have or a similar experience that you would have on ethereum layer one with uh doing everything in a block where you have to wait maximum of 12 seconds if you pay the right fee because that's the ethereum block there so I think that's going to be the going to be a very popular end State I do think there are going to be some ways to do it faster than that where the service that you're using takes on the risk for example so

it basically acts as a okay well I know this transaction is going to complete in like 10 minutes but I know my user wants their assets now so I'm going to front the assets for them take a small fee for doing so and then I'll settle it with the uh the back end later so to speak and that's actually how a lot of the banking system works today as well uh obviously it's inefficient but we can improve it drastic drastically with Unchained stuff instead of it taking you know three days for settlement it only takes 10 minutes for settlement and then the provider fronts the settlement for the user if the user doesn't want to wait for that 10 minutes for example so those are some ways it can work um but yeah I think we're gonna get there I think we're going to improve the

other user experience to the point where the user doesn't see any of this happening uh and they're going to have a wonderful experience that we're all used to uh on ethereum a layer one all right one here from Dev 22x long eth I hope you're not 22x long eat that's probably going to get you liquidated but um they ask what's your view on stockware as an L2 can will it become a threat with increased adoption for ethereum or will it add more value as it sits on ethereum curious as they seem to be developing a different design compared to other ZK l2s so they are definitely developing a different design where they're not focusing on ZK evm and even though they're building a ZK VM they are focusing on building their own ecosystem built on the Cairo language on Stark net which is not an evm Network it

is their own network built on Stark X I believe and they have Cairo which is not solidity it's their own language I don't think they're a threat to ethereum I think they're maybe the least ethereum Alliance L2 not not just because of um of the architecture but also just things that I've seen over time I think that their token distribution is pretty bad um but if I had to pick up negatives about stockware but generally I think stockware is a net positive I think they're doing a lot of amazing work they're doing different architecture than the rest of the l2s or most of the other l2s but that's totally fine we want different things to Blossom we don't want just everything to be evm in saying that I do believe there isn't going to be that many other ecosystems

other than the evm ecosystems that actually take off that actually accrue Network effect I think stock will probably be one of them but they're definitely focused on a different market share segment a different I think type of user than the other l2s are focused on also mainly because of the lack of evm compatibility but also because they seem to be focusing on more I guess like B2B relationships rather than b2c but it remains to be seen uh kind of like how that shakes out as well all right one here uh from RH who says what are the ethereum values principles that resonate with you most on a Global Perspective what's some what are some of the things that you wish to see ethereum solve for the world I'm interested in your take for the long term Horizon 10

to 20 years and Beyond so I think the principles that resonate with me most if I had to pick just a few of them would be obviously decentralization but I guess that's a bit of a copy out censorship resistance because I believe without censorship resistance a blockchain is useless uh freedom to transact which kind of comes into sensitive resistance uh open source I believe open source is a must I believe everything needs to be open source on a chain we need to be able to verify what you're interacting with uh on that chain um and and I believe uh the last principle which I think is more of maybe a meta principle on top of all the other ones is I believe that uh a strong sense of ownership right over not just the the

network but of your own assets and that's why I'm such a big proponent of self-custody because without a strong sense of ownership and without a strong sense of like a stake in the network I don't think you can actually care about the other values that much because if you don't have a personal space taking the network whether that be emotionally financially or some other way then you probably aren't going to care about the fact that ethereum is you know percentage of resistant it offers freedom to the world freedom to transact um it you know it's it's open source uh it doesn't discriminate you probably don't care about those things as much that if you do if you have a stake in the network so I believe that ownership is incredibly important here and that's the meta I guess value that probably sits on all of them that resonates with

me most now let's break the ownership value down a bit more here do you feel like you have a strong ownership over the the network or in the network you have a strong stake in the network if it's VC infested for example no I don't I don't feel like I would have a strong stake or a strong ownership of the of the network um in pretty much any other other l1s because most of them are VC infested they have very big investors in them that have the majority of the token Supply that have outsized Financial influence over the network that based basically influence the development of the network and from that perspective I don't feel any ownership over it at all I don't feel like I could have a stake in that Network so I don't whereas with

ethereum it's the complete opposite there are no big VCS in ethereum the biggest eath holder was Joe Lubin who has basically been whittled down on his eath from funding consensus which was helping the ethereum ecosystem grow especially in the early days but other than that you know ethi is very well distributed compared to these other networks there is a very Vibrant Community of etholders a very Vibrant Community of people that stake the eat that they've held for a long time that participate in staking as Solo validators or as running something like a rock-a-pull mini pool there is a very Vibrant ethereum Community that takes ownership over governance and and participating in governance that's another big thing as well so from that perspective that's why uh ownership for me resonates so strongly and and applies so strongly to ethereum and and basically lifts up all the other values

uh because of of that right because of the way ethereum is can that be bought no can that be uh I guess like developed over a time yes are there going to be other networks to develop this maybe is ethereum the only one that has this right now no but it's the only smart contract chain that has this right now the only other Network that has this is Bitcoin and Bitcoin is actually losing this over time it's losing its sense of ownership I believe and it's a stake in the network it's losing its other values over time it's eroding them by being so ossified so so kind of like I guess cult-like so steadfast in just sticking to one thing and that's it I believe it's losing it I believe ethereum is doing the opposite of that I believe ethereum is embracing its uh values and

its principles and its ownership I believe ethereum is becoming uh more widely adopted with people it's becoming more open to things than it was in the past it's because of the L2 rollout as well we have all these expressive l2s on top of ethereum layer one that can do their own things have their own Community Values and I think that all adds to the bottom base layer of ethereum it adds to ethereum's values so hopefully that answers your question I didn't really have that prepared that was just off the cuff but that's what resonates strongly with me all right you had a follow-up question where you said in the future whether ethereum roadmap has been completed what would you like to see happen so I actually answered this on uh refuel from I believe last week where I was talking about domothe's uh tweet where he said

that he believes long-term ethereum is going to enter a status uh sorry enter a phase of homeostasis instead of ossifying once its roadmap has been completed where essentially it it doesn't upgrade as frequently but if if something needs to be fixed or something needs to be upgraded the ethereum community is open to doing that instead of just being like okay well no we're not doing any changes no changes uh we have to deal with this in other ways but and but for my full answer to that question you should definitely go check out one of my refuels I don't know which one it was but it's time stamped where I talk about Domo these tweets about homeostasis all right so last few questions to get through uh Arjun here asks when you participate in all these private rounds do you use your your eth no I do not use

my eight I use fresh Fiat every single time I convert the Fiat to a US dollar stable coin and I send that US dollar stable coin to the funding rounds I have never sold any of my eighth the only eighth that I have spent uh has been eat for gas fees obviously and eat that I've used to pay people in terms of eat that I used to pay people I replenish that eighth straight away with fresh Fiat uh now I do that for tax purposes because under a certain amount using eth as as money is tax-free uh it's a small amount but it's still better it's more tax efficient for me to do it like that um in terms of gas fees sometimes I'll replenish it sometimes I won't just depends if I've got the money to do so I do regular eat buys anyway so it doesn't

really matter in my mind uh maybe I just delay the replenishment there but no I never use my eighth I've already said that I'm never selling my eighth I stake most of my Eve uh uh but yeah I would never think of using my to participate in these rounds next one comes from flyer897 who says what are your thoughts on staking as a service and what provider is regarded as the best why is this rarely talked about compared to liquid staking providers so as I mentioned before earlier in the in the AMA I believe the lines are blurred between these kind of staking as a service providers and lsds because some of them have lsds right like coinbase is a service that's taking as a service provider but it has an LSD called CBE and then you have uh binance that is the same thing has beef right so the lines

are blurred there but if you're talking about like pure staking service providers that don't have lsds I actually think that they're going to die out I actually think that they're going to lose to the ones that do have lsds because there's no real reason for you to stake with a service provider that does not have an LSD because it limits you it's it's happily inefficient so I actually think they're going to lose to these ones that have LSD so I guess in in taking that point of view I don't regard any of them as the best what I regard as the best in terms of their staking service providers that have lsds attached to them is rocketpool first and foremost like at the top of the list like there's no second best when it comes to that right solos taking obviously is above there but Source

taking isn't an ALICE there isn't a service provider studying as a service provider rocker pool number one buying Ras or spinning up a mini pool doesn't matter number one second would probably be Lido even though lidocops a lot of hate I think it's still marginally better than a coinbase or a binance right and then third I would say coinbase and binance but it's up to you maybe you don't want to go with lighter because they already have too much control over the control of them they have too much market share of the network right or too much influence on the network in terms of their estate then you go to another provider or maybe you don't trust Lido for whatever reason you go with another provider uh but maybe you don't want to go with rockapool because you don't trust rockapool you go for another provider

right so it's up to you who you want to go with but my ranking is definitely obviously solo staking first but on the LSD front or on the staking as a third provider front it would be uh it would be a rocker full Lido coinbase Kraken I don't think I don't know if Kraken has an LSD token but I would trust Kraken over binance uh personally and then binance right sorry that answers your questions there all right so one here from Shore man who says even though you are not a huge nft collector if you had to what nft would you buy with one 10 and 100 eighth um I mean because I'm not a huge into nfts I don't actually know the landscape very well I would never use my eth to buy any of the

nfts um uh directly obviously they're priced in E so I'd have to buy a new East to buy it with but I don't know I don't really have a good answer for you here I would probably buy a punk because I I think punks are cool and I I know that they've got a big Community behind them um maybe a a doodle I like the the art behind it I like the community behind it there um but other than that yeah I'm not I don't pay much attention uh to to nft so I can't really give a good answer here and by the way that's not investment advice don't go buy these just because I said so I don't have a good read on it I can safely say and if I'm a Noob when it comes to nfts all right uh last a couple of questions

here from two people so Finch should a staking Noob start out with vanilla solo staking or rocker pool any reasons to prefer one way over the other well I mean if you don't have 32 8 you already can't be a solo staking operator um so I guess you're basically assuming that this Noob has 32 8th I would say that if you're a complete Noob and you're just starting out it's kind of hard to say because are you a noob to staking or are you a noob to both staking and uh computers in general because to be a solo sticker you need to have least basic understanding of how computers work even if you're following the really basic guides are you scared of using terminal right are you scared of using the command line are you scared

that you're going to screw something up well in that case if you're scared at all you're not you don't want to take the risk then yeah it's not worth starting with solar staking it's probably worth going with rocketpool right but even then in rocketboy are you just buying arith are you setting up a mini pool because setting up a mini pool I would say is probably I mean I'll admit this I think setting up a mini pool is easier than solo staking but it's still using the command line are you scared of doing that then you're not going to be setting up a mini Port you're just going to go buy Ari which which is fine but right now there's a premium premium on RH you probably don't maybe you don't want to take that hit but in terms of reasons to prefer one way over the other

look this is an ongoing debate in the community and I actually don't know my total my uh kind of like I guess strong I don't maybe don't know is that the right term I don't have a strong view on this Solace taking in my view is the most decentralized self-sovereign way that you can stake on ethereum right there is no second best when it comes to solo staking but but it depends what your goals are if your goals are maximizing your yield is going to give you more because they pay out rewards for you staking with them right Solace taking doesn't pay you anything out except the staking rewards you get from the ethereum network itself whether they be consensus layer execution layer rewards doesn't matter whereas

rocketpool right now at least gives you if you spin up a mini pool today what it gives you is it gives you if you use rocket ARB you get the instant premium uh Arbitrage from that you get the normal staking rewards right uh from I guess depending if you opt into the smoothing pool or not it can be different but you get the normal staging rewards you get the RPL rewards which are already going to be more than the normal than the normal Stadium Awards and if you buy RPL and you and well you have to buy RPL to collateralize a mini pool with and that goes up in value over time uh against eth you have uh also made money that way too so in terms of if you're a profit maximalist probably rocker pulls better for you if you're a decentralization maximalist probably

solo sticking is better for you but then there are other considerations as well as the outline before so it's not black and white here it just depends what you prefer and it depends what you want to do with rocketpool do you want to just buy arith or do you want to be a mini pool operator you're going to earn more as a mini pool operator than you are as just holding our wreath um so yeah it just depends what you want to do on that front there and then you follow it up with uh Finch with do you think they will ever cap the maximum number of valid 8th validators allowed I think I heard Justin Drake toss the idea out one time on a podcast I think there eventually will be a soft cap in terms of active validators so for example let's say the soft cap is 30 million

active eat stake at any given time but there's 60 million each staked well that would mean that only 30 million eighth is active at any given time which means that six months of the year you wouldn't actually be actively staking as a data right half the time you would you would just be idle as a validator and your rewards would reflect that right um but they're in saying that we don't know what what this is going to look like yet there has been discussion around this I think they will cap the max number of of validators aka the max number of each stake on the network but whether it's a hard cap or a soft cap remains to be seen I think a hard cap would actually be pretty egregious it wouldn't actually work especially with lsds because there'd be premiums everywhere um and the premium wouldn't go down

unless that hot in this the um unless the uh the estate went down which we don't know when would happen so it would actually I don't think a hard cap would work I think it's much more likely that we get a soft cap or we just rotate validators through who knows what that soft cap is going to be is it going to be 30 million eight is it going to be 50 million is it going to be 60 million we don't know we'll have to see how that plays out but I don't think the cap will come anytime soon maybe when we get to 30 million either stake there'll be serious discussions about it uh but yeah I don't I don't see it happening within the next probably two years but maybe it'll happen after that but yeah I think it eventually will happen in there all

right last uh I guess question from uh or I guess clarification that Christy cloudy wants so they said I would like to ask about dank sharding and how it will work do I describe the process correctly l2s will send their bundles of transactions to L1 the specialized Builders create one large blob of all the data we will extend the data by using read Solomon code based on polynomials which allows us to reconstruct all the data even if we know only a portion of it which is called Data availability sampling or Das each validator will download 50 of the whole extended batch each of them will have a bit of different portion from these from this data they can attest that all data is available this is from my understanding a pretty good summary of how it works now this is full dank

sharding not proto-dank sharding the the main difference between fall down shining and Protank sharding is that full tank shining has data available data availability sampling and product shining does not and I believe the expiry of blobs I don't know for sure if blobs to expire under dank shardy Under full dank sharding but even if they do the expiry will be longer um but yeah that's that's basically how it would work is that the the whole network does not have to store all the data only I'd have to store report they only have to store a small portion of it and then we do that availability sampling on it to make sure that data is still available even though we only have a portion of that data using uh the polynomials that you mentioned here so

yeah that was a great little um explanation there I think that does a great job of explaining it but I'm not an expert on dang sharding that's for sure so if you want to read more about it everyone just Google dank sharding Google erp4844 it'll give you a better breakdown there but yeah that's it for the questions for today so thank you everyone for listening to me ramble on for what is it an hour and a half just over an hour and a half yeah hope you enjoyed this Ama I think I previously said that the Cadence of these things would be every two weeks I might stress that out to like every month because I think every 2x might be too frequent um and it's a bit hard for me to do them every two weeks so I may stretch that out to every month so don't be surprised

if if there's a month that goes by before another AMA comes out but you can start asking your questions today if you want so join the daily grade Discord Channel link is in the YouTube description below go to the AMA series Channel ask it there and I'll be sure to answer it on the next AMA that I do but thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you on tomorrow's refuel thanks everyone