How To: Shop For Ethereum Validator Hardware

Transcript

hello everyone i'm superfiz from the eath staker community and this is our probably our first formal fancy call of 2022 i'm really excited to have the gang together today we're going to uh heckle mr mojo i mean sorry we're going to help mr mojo as he um he's our intern and we have tasked him with shopping for hardware to set up a validator um and so i know that's like that's a big question on everyone's mind uh when you start uh as a as a validator um lamboshi or nolan as he's here uh has done a bunch of great hardware guides uh and he's he's generally considered

the hardware guru um we also have anvedica with us hey michael um we have our new east takers uh thorsten and remy um who both have a wealth of knowledge uh in setting this stuff up and and knowing what's what's a good hardware configuration uh and sam is hanging out with us uh kind of half working on something else and um half here to help us be on task so uh glad to have everyone today for sure so mr mojo is that do i call you mr mojo you can call me mojo if you want to a lot of people just call me mojo modifiers you have a name modifier and i

have a name modifier so mojo um i was like i almost was gonna say your real name because that's how i know you best and for the record i also got a new camera set up i don't know how well it's going to work if it doesn't work i'm going to text jeremiah and say uh jets jt nickel for me stake or say hey dude what's going on my camera mojo biz what what do you know about staking on ethereum uh i know a lot of the here take my ethereum and stake it for me services uh but i personally am not interested in that i really want to run my own thing i i think it's way cooler if i'm in

control of my ethereum staking than just trusting someone else to do it for me so this is like the first step in going towards that awesome and so we obviously for this far we know that in order to host a node um there are two general options the gold standard for node operations is solo staking on the ethereum network with one of the four validator clients those are white house nimbus teku and prism we also know that right now we have huge concerns about client diversity and we recognize that running prism is not healthy for the network uh even though

the prism is a fine client uh 68 of the clients run it and we need to scale back from there so that's solo um the other way that that uh e-staker pro promotes is i hate promotion that sounds like marketing the other way that we support no we support all the ways help me get the right word here yeah we promote rocket pull um the rocket pull requires you to have 16 ether and 1.6 rpl in 1.6 eth in rpl and then you can also be a solo node operator uh which option are we going with here today i'm unsure okay being honest being honest with you i i kind of wanted to get some

information on how the hardware works what every part means for it and then kind of go from there i think so the good news is um i'll give nolan a chance nola what's the difference in hardware requirements between running a node on rocket pool and running a gold standard solo node that was one of my questions actually as near as makes no difference zero yeah so exactly the the same hardware as a matter of fact if you run on rocket pool you're still staking as a solo operator you're just using ether that come from some other people so cool i think for well we don't actually have to get to

that questions today do we because we're really just focusing on buying hardware yes and i have some hardware related questions i would like to ask the route as well when we're going through so why don't you start with your first question and i will shut up and let some of the smart people answer sure so one of the first things that i want to ask is people told me that if i wanted to run a solo validator i need to have what's called a nuk or nuc i'm not sure how to properly say that out loud yet but uh what is that and why would i use that as opposed to say my regular good computer who wants to take that not everybody else wants so i have a biased take on that um the knock is a convenience

it takes a it's a small form factor pc really compact right intel and amd make them i think on amd it's not actually amd it's asus but same difference they usually run a little hotter because they're tiny they typically are meant um for like this kind of lightweight operation you typically find like four and six core cpus in there um you find memory that does not tell you when it breaks and it's not really built for remote operation so it's not home server gear it's a small mini pc think like a mac mini but in the pc world

okay basically it's like a little mini computer that allows me to do specific things easier as opposed to like a wide range of things like a regular computer would it will allow you to do all the things a regular computer does minus maybe putting a you know mega nvidia card in there and playing whatever the kids play these days um so in that way it's it's it's a real computer but it you don't have to put it together right the amount of lego you do is reduced maybe you put some ram and an ssd in but that's it right right so essentially

are these like already pre-built or do you have to build them yourself or is can you do one or the other two options really one is you buy what's known as a bare bone snuck it comes with the with the motherboard the case the the power supply is usually built in the cpu everything in one and then you slot in some ram and you put in whatever storage you want whatever ssd you want right and then you're done so a tiny amount of adult lego um the other option is to buy it ready-made the ram and the ssd is already in and off you go okay cool so you you talk about ram and ssd a lot so

i'm assuming those would be very important for something like this oh you need them you need to run your programs in something right yes yep there there's there's i'm not sure that's a knock right so they're tiny right they're nice and tiny that's a real advantage they're usually also really small they can get a little hot but you can get around that by by um by by fiddling with their settings a little so um go ahead i i love these i actually have uh four of them that i right um i repurpose frequently so i would just wipe them and i i do a lot of testing with them um i could use virtual machines but

sometimes i want to leave one of these running for a year and other than my staking hardware nothing i have runs continuously but these i i can always uh it's just a great little piece of i would call it a piece of kit um very convenient we've seen some failure modes right so you asked about ram and ssd we've seen some failure modes with these knocks let's start with the ram it's just your usual pc ram so it's not server ram it will not shout at you if it fails right which means that if it fails testing that gets really cumbersome you're talking about a week of banging on the thing to figure it out right so my recommendation there is get the

most boring stick of ram you can right if it says samsung or crucial on it and it's not overclocked and it doesn't have any rgbs perfect that's what you want for the ssds mostly most everything works we've seen some issues with ones that run very hot because these knocks are so small so if they get to 50 c 60 c celsius whatever that is in fahrenheit um they start really slowing down and they might not be able to keep up and then the other thing is like the ultra ultra budget stuff like pny whatever you know qlc dram less a hundred bucks for two terabytes

that stuff might not keep up but if it's a reasonable mainstream brand and you know if google did a little and you found okay it's not gonna melt on me it's gonna work just fine in there i want to put out something you said you know if if something in this fails if the motherboard fails if the ram fails if these your staking hardware is generally for lack of a better word disposable now you want it to run for a long time you want it to run for a couple years but a lot of people put their heart and soul into their staking setup and they're terrified for anything to go wrong with it and kind of the thing people need to understand is

your validator node is really just something that uses your keys to do a job and as long as you have your keys you can always be down for a couple hours a couple days a week to put up a new system and keep it going redundancy is great overkill hardware is is fine if that's what you want to do but it's important to think about these as disposable validating tools that you can easily rebuild and keep going if you need to going back to the hardware talk specifically in relation to the hard drive yorick is there a reason why i would choose an ssd over over a spinning

platter hey you asked that in such a way as if you know there is [Laughter] good question particularly in in a knock where i have to choose one or the other the clients we're using uh the execution client like a geth or or a peso or whatever it might be the consensus client to a lesser degree like the lighthouse the takers of the world they have a copy of the database of the chain on the drive usually not a complete copy but a fairly large copy so you're talking 600 gig or so of data that's flashing around there and they're constantly reading and writing this

because the what's known as the blockchain state changes all the time people send stuff around so you may need to make changes to the database all of which says if this was a hard drive it would have to what's known as seek move the head around 200 to 300 times per second and it literally cannot do that it can't hard drives top out as what's known as about a hundred ios per second ssds can do thousands because it's that there's no spinning parts no dry no har no no head needs to be moved right so it it they're a lot faster with seek times and that's why we're using ssds because

they're the database behind that reads and writes tiny amounts of data hundreds of times a second and the hard drives can't keep up we actually have another tier we have spinning platters we have ssd and then we have nvme which is an ssd yes it's an ssd interface right but is there a because nvme goes it's like 5x faster is there any difference for a home validator whether they choose a two and a half inch ide ssd or a nvme ssd probably not you're you're just talking about really with nvme and the sata you're talking about interfaces

that drives behind them an nvme drive can get a lot faster so i've got one that can sync geth in like five hours for example right where my sata takes 12 hours well how often do i think guess that doesn't matter really you know and then the the other truth as well is you can have sata ssds that are faster than nvme ssds because what's in there also matters it's not just how fast can the bust move the data it's also how fast can the ssd itself handle the data and in the end the same thing is in there there's a controller there's some flash um there might be hopefully some some ram as a cache right but if there isn't

it gets slower um the more bits you cram into that flash at the same time this is way with things like a tri layer and quad layer come in the more bits you cram in the slower the whole thing gets so yeah i long story short no either one is fine just get a reputable brand and you're good you're kind of touching on what fizz was talking about before you can get you know you can be as complex or simple with these setups as as you can you know you can have redundant power supplies and and all the bells and whistles but something i want to touch on specifically with the nux is you know we we touted them as um basically laptop hardware low power like

low consuming power i want to address this specifically because we get a lot of these questions with the stakers especially for new solo stakers is is that going to be enough not just today but but going forward you know two plus five years from now is this something where i'm gonna eventually uh it won't be powerful enough or or whatever the causes may be you know what does that look like we do a magic uh eight ball screen share right quick you got one of those go shake it tell me what it says uh it says most likely great i love it that's the right answer

most likely yes that is exactly the right answer so we expect um that current uh requirements will not greatly increase this we expect this one from a technological perspective but also because we know what all core devs in the ethereum foundations or the people behind ethereum what they're thinking and what they're thinking is we are not solana we do not want 500 a thousand or whatever it is validators we wants hundreds of thousands and that means it needs to run on consumer equipment and it needs to keep running on consumer equipment and there's all kinds of technical

things that are already being thought about such as you know reducing the amount of of data we're actually holding and and making sure that computation isn't too complex uh locally and in the end that's that's the whole ethos of ethereum that anybody can run a node so i expect that will continue and the knock you by today will still validate happily five years from now awesome yep i love hearing that and i love like jamming at home you know you don't you don't need a supercharged double redundant power supply water cooled like gaming rig like you can we can totally do this on on the nut comfortably is however true that you get additional eth if you have many rgbs on it

right yep that's a great shout out you gotta have the rgbs incentive rewards i like those all right cool so there's something that i did want to ask so um how many nodes in our validators am i able to run on one of these things at once more than you can afford really unless you are very very rich in which case buy a better machine we've it's been tested and tested with four thousand no problem there's been a problem at ten thousand uh the professional staking outfits stop at 1 000 for just blast radius reasons you don't want one of those machines

going down and taking more than 1 000 things down with it so if you have more than 32 000 eth buy a second one please not because you have to but because you know because why not right yeah exactly don't forget your friend superfiz that's right yes if if you want to help me reach my goal of running a thousand of those faster mr mojo.edu just send it all there yeah yeah all right well then that means i guess for me and everybody else on the planet for the most part we're only gonna need one which is great because that means you just go through you buy your one you

really don't have to worry about it anymore then it's great that we said that there it's actually uh not only can one machine run a thousand validators you should not uh buy multiple machines to run your validators uh so that's a lot of people love redundancy and they say well if i'm gonna buy one i might as well buy two so that if one goes down i can run the other one in theory there there's some some merit to that in practice you should never run your validator keys on two setups it will lead to a slashing event it is very serious it is one of the most important things we have to say to any new validator any old validator never run your keys on two machines um under

any circumstances i i want to carry out that like unless you know what you're doing but if you know what you're doing then you're not listening to me anyway uh but i i i wanna i wanna caveat your caveat super so um early on in in mainnet this happened there were people who said aha but we are not just superfiz in his you know baseball wherever he lives we are smart we are the best engineers in the industry we can do this and we can do it safely and it was a large staking outfit and guess what they got over a hundred validators slashed this way that's just pure hubris as an engineer you know as somebody smart understand that you're gonna screw up so

you know just run it in one place and if it's down bring it back up that's it um there's if you want backup hardware don't install anything on it leave it bare metal uh and that way when your system goes down you can set it back up um a lot of people are you know they want to clone their drives and have one ready to go uh that's it's just dangerous it's playing with fire so this is something that's near and dear to my heart because i come originally from the nas the true nas community before i got into ethereum and those guys built serious home servers they cost about the same as a knock they require a little bit more adult lego they do not come pre-assembled and they have a lot of this kind of

redundancy built in right so now the power supply isn't redundant but how often does that fail the memory is server memory so if it fails it will tell you and it will self-repair so you can just schedule a swap out the drives are often mirrored so if a drive fails just put another one in let it re-silver you know problem solved so if you're really really keen on that i would go with just a little bit of home server redundancy in one machine rather than running two machines there's some merit to that no one and i actually run uh servers we we run industrial servers at our homes just because we're idiots i mean uh we because it's awesome

yes that's right awesome when we started this a couple of years before the beacon chain launched we did not know what the actual hardware requirements were going to be and we didn't want to be left behind so nolan and i connected because we were chatting and we're like wait we have the same server we're both we're both fools um but it's still it's cool it's all right uh one of the things we have run into is i've run into uh our server hardware is it's like eighth generation intel um and it does not run all of the instruction sets required for like go so things some things like for example prism will not work on servers that are

that old without a special compile which is fine because we don't want you to run prism right now anyway there you go superfiz can i ask you a leading question so if i can if i can if i can build this on this tiny little knock right can i just do 250 gig of ssd or 500 gig of ssd why do i even need a full copy of the chain can i just point to that inferior well it's like i think nolan might have a better did you were you in that conversation or i know thorsten was so no no is the answer um you you do need to have a full copy of both the consensus layer chain that we

call eth2 and the execution layer chain that we call eth1 and so there is still maybe a little bit of debate about the actual size of the drive that you need if you ask me i'm going to say you need two terabytes other people may come up with slightly different standards right who is a conservative number you'll be fine with one or one and a half terabytes you're you're going to end up if you use geth you're going to end up uh having to compress that every week or months every six months or so yeah not fun which it's it's no big deal if you're saving money uh and you're still buying reputable hardware

then that that may be okay but i really do prefer and feel more comfortable with two terabytes you're also probably not running 10 to 100 validators or a thousand in that case if you are just spring for the two terabyte and i'm guessing um mojo still has a bunch of questions um regarding his uh shopping spree yes so um one of the questions that i have is i guess we've also kind of been going over it already but um what does each part do or mean for staking in one of these machines we've already kind of gone over

what an ssd can do for these is essentially allowing you to make a copy of the beacon chain onto your onto your little machine here but what did the other parts do if you want to go over that for me and why would they be important you want to talk about the seven essential parts of the computer i think that was asking he's asking what does a cpu do what does well no not not not not necessarily what i mean is like in terms of like staking like what you know you you've kind of described like what an effort oh yeah how much should it be a terabyte of ram yeah yeah okay that that's what's to take about one to get towards yes sure so um

let's talk about ram the and i i thorsten can fill in with with the more technical details i'm always like a higher level kind of guy but programs like uh your consensus layer client and your execution layer client uh for simplicity i'm gonna let's call them nimbus and guess they run in memory uh so the the computer doesn't access the hard drive every time it needs to to run those it they it kind of loads them in memory and they run from memory with what's called a memory footprint so that application is going to be allocated an amount of memory uh and that's what it runs with and so we know that in general

most consensus and execution uh layer combos take between 8 and 16 gigs of ram and so that's that's kind of what we want to to leave them with you i don't think you really need more than 16 but you do need at least eight um and the while the benefits are are minimal um do you do eight i would not do eight because we've done this in rocket pool with the our pies and they start pruning death every one and a half months because they don't have enough ram to keep the database from growing so don't do eight so you need 16 gigs of memory i don't think you need 32 um i do run 32 just because i believe in overkill um and you'll

you'll find that with me we all have our own little style and my style is usually to throw more hardware at a problem than it needs um our good friend joe clappis is a minimalist he wants to run things on the absolute minimum of hardware just to just because it's a challenge for him um there's probably someone who's a rationalist no one are you a rationalist well you have the same server idea yeah so you might find someone who who is like middle of the road but in my experience it's always better to have a little bit more than necessary um so that you don't butt your head against this like the same problem over and over so you're going to need at least 16 gigs

of memory we talked about the size of the hard drive the processor is actually very important we haven't really addressed that yet one of the reasons i like modern knucks is any nut any modern nook you buy is going to be able to keep up with the chains but there are some some hardware or some cpu specifics um and i don't i just kind of buy big cpus i would say um anything for core and reasonably recent is fine period if you want to throw six or eight cores at it go for it you know you don't need it but it won't hurt you um 32 gig of ram um can be useful it does two things for you one you can run any combo of client you like so if

you're like i really like java i want taku and besu and i want to give him big cash that's gonna fit into 16 just but it'll definitely fit into 32 right the other reason is if you're like oh i really love geth yes i know it's a majority client but i want to run it but i don't like that it's growing by like 13 14 gig a week give it more cash which you can do with 32 gig and it'll grow slower so there's that you know and future proofing we as we have an idea what things are going to look like in a year but none of us knows the reality of it and so buying a little uh more hardware than you need is great for future perfect uh yeah back to cpu

you can you can have yeah i'm not gonna say much about that only that um if i future proof today and i need it in two years time in two years time i could have gotten twice that for half the price totally accurate yeah um that's speaking of price uh we don't want us i'm not trying to make you spend a lot of money but don't skimp either um you should plan to fairly spend about a thousand dollars on this setup now yes obviously if if you want to run on a pie you can get away with running the whole thing for 250 or so but i really do encourage you if if you're a home enthusiast if you're not trying to do really cool things if

you just want to make it work then plan to budget about a thousand dollars for the setup and remember we're talking i mean in the case of rocket pool it's like fifty thousand dollars worth of ether here you it's not eve isn't three hundred dollars anymore it makes sense to invest into a good setup versus china where we get the the ominous music and we talk about east going back to three hundred dollars into two wait wait wait it's back there now two years two months later we're back at 300. who knew all right mojo how are we doing now it's it's it's it's great i'm

getting a lot better understanding so we're trying to look at anything maybe like an i5 or better for cpu anywhere from one to two terabytes an ssd and then 16 gigs plus of ram pretty much would be the minimums that we would want to look for like or if i was to go on say a new egg and to put in i want these specs on the side for my filters i would want to select those as like give me this and up yeah yeah like you you can build this with a with a recent like a 9th generation rob i3 you can build it with amd um like some people built this with amd laptop chips 4 500 use you know works fine

we can make this as complicated as it wants to be really what i like to do is just find a good nut sku that like a sku is just the the model name like this i'm running here a uh bx nuk 10i 7f in h1 and if someone says that to you you can go and buy that and have everything that we're talking about without having to mix and match parts and paste it together um so what what what was that one more time can you post that for us so that uh we can quickly take a look release so i can quickly take a look here i actually have new egg open at the moment so let me see it's so while you're doing that i think one of the questions we should uh directly

answer is and i think mojo asked this in an earlier question but we didn't address it head-on and that is what specifically why can't i do this on my own pc why wouldn't i run this on uh our our daily runner why do we want a separate clean system for our validator good question here why indeed yolo man i can take this one um like one of the main reasons you don't want to run your uh staking setup on your like personal machine that you use daily is like the updates like like when you're gonna be doing updates on

your personal machines maybe you want to restart your sticking machine as well i mean i i did this mistake myself eventually i moved to to a dedicated hardware and then and so so that's one of the main reasons i see um not to run your sticking setup on own machine even if you could do it even like even if like you you have some vm running around and then you have plenty of ram plenty of cpu um it's it's not a good idea you're much better running this on a dedicated machine and and the not the knocks and the different small factor pcs are pretty good for this so i'll add a few ideas one is that the

stacking software is written with linux in mind it can run windows but windows isn't easy mode for this it's easy mode for client but for this it's actually hard mode it's harder to get this right on windows from getting the time sync right to making sure it actually starts when the machine starts not when you log in because you don't want to have a situation where say you know you're away from the weekend power goes out briefly it comes back if this was a linux machine it would just run out run again if if not if it's windows and it's not set to start onstart but it starts on login like most things do in windows because it's a client machine not a server machine right a client os not a server os you've been down for the weekend or the

week and you get the offline penalties for that so overall all the guides all the tooling is created in linux all the stuff that also automates it is in linux with some exceptions i know remy you have like the the windows wizard but for the most part this is a whole lot easier to get right and to have up and running 24 7 and stable on a linux machine and so it it makes sense to have that be a separate machine right the other part is a security concern but that security concern i would say is actually less with the staking machine and more with the machine you use to interact with your crypto

which is if i'm sending crypto receiving crypto i may not want that to be the machine where i'm also doing uh adult entertainment and regular email and regular browsing because i'll get a trojan at some point you know it'll it'll steal my crypto but that's less a staking worry that's more a general where should i do crypto worry we didn't verify this but we have a very trustworthy report of a gpu miner who downloaded a an ethereum gpu mining client that explored his network and extracted his uh validator keys so that's another

reason why uh you would not uh want to run multiple more software that is necessary on your staking machine then we're also we have lots of instructions for hardening your staking machine so that that even if there is something on your network it's not going to be able to get in and one other reason why you might want to use a dedicated dedicated machine is um it's more like a set and forget right you set up your machine you put it somewhere and you just forget about it mostly like you still have to do updates and then you still have to prune eventually but um it's much easier to think that way i think but remy if i forget it how will i know when it's down how will i know when my

oh when my validator isn't earning money that's a pretty good question and maybe that's somewhat a little further from the hardware shopping that we've been talking about but there's a bunch of monitoring tools that you could use um the the beacon chain website has some pretty nice monitoring tools there there's a bunch of graphing dashboards and alerting that you can set up on your own machine but there's a bunch of other stuff that you can set up once you you're done with your main validator uh yeah vegan chain is what i was aiming at right that that just that just solves it all right mr mojo what other questions we got there's a full disclosure of buddha works for beacon chain and we are

closely aligned with them we do hold them in high regard yep sure let me take a look over them see if there was anything that didn't get brought up yet it doesn't seem like it all the questions i have i think we've gone over it more everything i've thought of at least has already been answered so what's the what's your final bill of materials here mojo what are you buying bill materials what am i buying hmm well superfiz is recommendation you know he threw it in in our zoom chat here i've been looking at it and it's it's well within budget i mean honestly i think just to keep it simple i when it whenever i'm just gonna say whenever i get a recommendation from

super fizz i'm probably gonna take it cross your fingers and take that with a great grain of salt you know but uh personally um i've been looking at the one that that he's given us i'm just like wow this this looks like practically everything i would want and more it's well within budget i'm probably just gonna end up going with this this is definitely why i pushed for him to be your intern i guess do you have good recommendations do you have a recommendation for the right mountain to be on for denver and go skiing yeah where where where should we go skiing i have not been in denver there's a this yeah wow i think

i think that might be good to go somewhere like i don't know after the 21st maybe a little less than a week or right and then of course i i have to um since we had the the breckenridge they go since we had the shout out uh to joe earlier i have to say so people have been doing this on a pi 4 with 8 giga ram and an external samsung t5 specifically that one because it seems to be the only drive actually fast enough that's external and joe has been working on making this a little faster so he's got this idea where you take a pi compute module stick an nvme ssd into it and then that

gets rid of the external and just now in pre-order is something called the rock 5b which is 16 gig of ram and as big an ssd as you want it takes regular full-size nvme ssds and and still you know the pi software on it still an arm processor um still 15 watts max i think of of of draw so for people who really love minimal that's that's that's for fun that's for fun that's right there are people who run it in production seriously um but but this is their kind of game um this isn't everyone's kind of game so if

you're just trying to save money that's not the route you want to go no it's not for saving money it's for being able to brag that your staking machine is literally powered by a banana that's what it's for there's a gadget i wanted to mention about um people buying knocks or like small factor pcs in general um if you buy the bare bone units where you have to buy the ram um separately and the the disc separately make sure you you check the compatibility with the different ram modules and um like some ssd sizes won't fit in the in those small boxes right so if you if you don't know about all of those stuff um maybe create a list and send it to us

we'll check it for you make sure it fits uh correctly and it's all compatible and then i'll come back to a tall and a short version the tall version has a spot for a 2.5 inch ssd only has a slot for the nvme stick now when if you look at the specs the hardware specs for this it's going to say like the maximum ssd size is something like a terabyte but we know through tons and tons of practice uh that um we haven't observed a limit to existing ssd sizes in these in these devices yet there isn't one um i i do want to uh you know once more say when you're choosing

ram shoes boring and reliable you know you don't want in as much as i giggle about rgbs to myself you don't want the gamer rgbs you don't want the overclock you don't want the xmp stuff all you're doing is you're introducing instability into your system just yeah it's one of those things where you choose corsair or something and sort by the highest rated and just go with it because that's uh at least that's the way that i do it yeah sure that works you know or people have had good success with the with the samsung sticks because they're boring you know they're they're they're running at the rated speed they're not trying to go fast

and that's all you need one thing i would like to go ahead you first i was just going to kind of zoom out the question i'm going to pose here is slightly outside of the the shopping uh hardware specific question here but i think it's we'll tie it in and that is uh just an observance right so we're talking about best hardware for solo staking on ethereum but let's look at the range here we're talking about raspberry pi's we're talking about laptop hardware uh consumer grade towers to enterprise servers how is it that ethereum can handle that range isn't isn't it something you know isn't uh

this like mining huge warehouses full of gpus like how is uh ethereum have this flexibility where there's range in in into the world of solo staking and why would that be valuable and i'm thinking of like the nft world and on one of the digs in terms of like uh the the sort of narrative within cryptocurrency is that this is bad for the environment this this is uh consuming way too much power in electricity maybe we can kind of touch on the the spectrum here that ethereum brings to the table and solving for that

problem sure and that's actually i've actually heard this and i i you know being so deep in the tech i found it surprising at first but you're 100 right the person said i'm really interested in nfts but i know they're bad for the environment and so nft such as tokens they're good or bad or not for the environment depending on the underlying blockchain right so super you want to take it what is proof of stake and why does it take less energy yeah i got excited when i realized hey this is a setup um when ethereum was released in 2015 it mined with um with an algorithm that that's specific well it's not specific it's it benefits from massively parallel processing uh and so in the beginning

that was done with cpus and now it's done with powerful gpus the the current ethereum chain what we call the proof of work chain is powered by millions of gpus all around the world it's one of the reasons gamers hate uh cryptocurrency because um cryptocurrency enthusiasts uh buy up gpus at outrageous prices and prevent people from using them in their gaming systems they use a ton of electricity when i mined a bitcoin 2011 when i mined ethereum in the beginning i ran my gpus as hard and as hot as i could and closed my eyes about the power bill things are different now um we recognize

the impact that cryptocurrency can have on the environment and we recognize that if ethereum is going to be a good global citizen it has to change um and uh it it was actually part of vitalik's original roadmap in 2014 you described it as serenity it's the switch to proof of stake rather than building blocks by entering this kind of contest with other gpus it's now a selected a selection process for people who hold 32 ether and so the benefit of this is that we can run a much larger network and only use uh

100th of the power that we're currently using on the ethereum proof of work chain uh it's actually less than one hundredth that's like one ten thousandths yeah that's the exaggeration itself it is it is infinitesimally smaller and so this is going to allow ethereum to be a good uh global citizen as we provide a valuable service i i don't i don't want to slander any other chain but um this this kind of is in contrast to other chains who um are burning energy to make money uh it was how we started uh it's not something that i'm proud of it's not

something that i think we should continue the good news is um ethereum is is changing to be a better global citizen and i think in time people will recognize that and value us for it offset box yeah so 99.5 at least reduction in energy use right hopefully still this year um so if you're in the market for a gaming gpu um wait a few more months there should be a flood of them in the market we kind of know historically um when uh gpu mining opportunities disappear that uh other gpu mining opportunities appear maybe we we hope that

um that we're kind of setting a standard for again good global citizenship because the the same gpus in a gamers box aren't aren't burning the same kind of electricity that they're burning in a minor farm in a mining farm they're running at 110 percent 24 hours a day seven days a week and never stop until they die and then you start them again and let them die again but if they're in a gamer's box they're only running 18 hours a day uh and so that was a joke uh and so it's it's much better for those gpus to be in the hands of gamers than in the hands of miners all right

then so dakotas oh i did it i was muscles to out you that's how i know you mojo thanks for being our guinea pig i look forward to this year to you learning with us um and kind of helping us remember the things that we didn't know or that we forgot to ask um and so i'm glad you're so sharp i'm glad you're you're on this journey with us um thanks to everyone who came today to kind of help kind of examine the big picture of hardware and figure out uh what it takes to build a box from scratch we wanted to pop back in because something else important uh came across as we were chatting afterwards that we

really do need to bring up and that is bandwidth your internet connection your internet service provider so a lot of us some of us live in areas where bandwidth is never anything that crosses our mind others of us have data caps and so watching netflix or use playing games can can burn up your availability and there are really two things to think about in terms of your network that is uh well your your transmission speed and your data cap um and so who can talk to me about transmission speed let's do transmission speed first what's uh what's a you don't need much transmission you

don't need much 25 down 10 up is plenty plenty if you have broadband you're good so go to speedtest.net or speedup.me do internet speed test if you see at least 25 down and 10 up you're great that that is it's pretty standard if if you uh even if you have a cell connection you can you can get much better than that um is that in terms of does that matter on the volume of validators that i'm hosting in regards to that speed a good question it probably does a i haven't done that yeah so right now it doesn't matter a lot right

but what we do know is that um in the future running more than one validator is likely to use more data and it's just something to keep in mind you may need to think about future proofing but we're not sure exactly what that looks like at this moment wow so in terms of total ban or total bandwidth per per month data cap it's using a little uh it's using that very consistently so how much how much are we talking about thorsten um i have seen figures from anywhere between two to four terabyte a month um and if you just fell out of your chair then it's time to think about not

doing hardware but doing like a cloud vps or something it depends a little bit on how many peers you give your clients because this is all peer-to-peer they all talk to each other right if you lower the peer number it'll be lower maybe you can get away with just under two terabyte but yeah it's a it's a shockingly high number if you're under a data cap yeah and before you jump to a cloud service provider i would like to urge caution i i am not a fan of cloud data service providers for staking on the beacon chain because they have a natural proclivity to concentrate the network um and the entire goal with a beacon train validator is to be up um

and really not do you want to be up you want to be up when everyone else is down so if you're at home and your validator goes down for an hour it's no big deal but if the eastern half of the united states goes down and you're down then you really want to get up as quickly as you as you can because the the penalties scale with the number of validators that are down so what's your recommendation super what does somebody do who has either bad internet or capped internet at home first it makes sense to investigate another provider option if that's available it may be worth it uh there's also bonded connections you may be able to get uh two connections and

bond them together you may be able to get a different plan for your provider that gives you more bandwidth um i before you consider a vps i i would really encourage you to maybe think about a product like rocket pull where you're doing passive staking where someone with that bandwidth and that hardware is taking and you hold the read token and collect you know 90 of the rewards um that in my mind is still decentralized taking and is preferable putting a lot of eth in under one roof if essentially if you're using aws and 80 of people oh don't use aws it's really

expensive and it goes down and you're going to say but it never goes down you're right but if it goes down for 10 minutes there's going to be a severe consequence if a lot of people are on it um and so that's just my two cents i know there are even and this this makes me sad there are rocket pull node operators who choose cloud instances and i feel like that's that's not in the spirit of decentralization everything that we're doing is trying to spread the network as thinly around the world as we can and not concentrate it in these warehouses at the end of the day if the best staking that you can do

is on a vps uh and that's what you need to do and you need to do that with prism i'm okay with that i it's okay i almost believed that it's true it's true in the same way i support all stakers in any way they can stick but i want everyone to stake to the highest standard that they can to promote the health of the network uh and if you hear me trying to talk you out of prison if that's the thing that you have to use it's okay if if you have to use a vps that's okay um i i want you to stake i just want you to stake to the highest standard for the

health of the network that you can