Hudson Jameson - Ethereum Through the Eyes of a Solo Staker Since the Testnets

Transcript

Hello everyone. All right, so I have been in Ethereum for a long time. My name is Hudson Jameson. Um, I've been doing a variety of stuff with like the Ethereum Foundation and Polygon and Flashbots. And one of the things that I really love doing is solo staking at home to support Ethereum's network. Yay. So, this is kind of just a fun presentation where we're going to go down memory lane. Uh for those who were here in the early days or maybe if you weren't, you can kind of see some artifacts, screenshots, tweets uh from way back when.

First, where it all started for me was around May 2020 when I decided to participate in the early Ethereum test nets for uh solo staking. I wrote a blog uh it's still on my website hudsonjson.com where I talked about uh staking with Topaz which was a uh Prism test net uh and using DAP node uh for under $750. The Topaz test net was one of the I think four test nets that Prism did. Prism here either either way it was one of the uh early test nets for Ethereum 2.0 when it was called that. Um, and uh, yeah, I actually still have the POA app from that. Uh, I'm really proud of

um, back then. This was the system requirements way back when, um, they were doing the test nets. This is what Prism said that we needed. If you look at this now and you're a solo staker, you can kind of see how things have changed. Um, on the right is what I ended up buying uh, for my setup. I wanted something that was really quiet, so I got a fanless mini PC. Um, you'll see later that was a problem with heat, but uh, we'll get to that in a little bit. And yeah, I also got, yeah, 16 gigabytes of RAM and a, uh, two TB hard drive because that's what you needed back then. Very different now.

This was the Dap Node install screen at the time. Um, originally I actually didn't use DAP node. I set it up on an instance of like Ubuntu and um, someone was talking to me about this. I think it was Kfax was talking to me in the lobby and said, "Oh, I remember you did a YouTube live stream where you were drinking beers and trying to set up your solo staking node and I remember that stream and that got me started." And I was like, "Really? Me drinking on a live stream got you started staking? That's pretty incredible." Um, so yeah, I originally had an Ubuntu instance running where I just would run all the programs, but I'm not CIS adminy enough to really do it any justice. So eventually I switched to DAP node which

is uh for those who don't know what DAP node is, it's a all-in-one uh solution for Ethereum staking where you can install it on a new computer uh and um you know pick which staking uh sources you want. There's going to be some screenshots later that'll better explain like the whole situation. This is what it looked like uh back in 2020. So if you were to uh boot up your DAP node and you were to see what uh DAPs were available and what applications were available, this would be some of them. Uh shout outs. Wow.

Storagej trust lines. Boink. Okay. Boink's actually still on there. But anyways, just just we got some old stuff here. You could run the prism slasher way back when. And uh yeah, this is what I used to run my uh test net node because topaz was supported on DAP node back at the time. Um yeah. Okay. This is actually yeah I skipped a little bit by saying that I switched from Ubuntu to uh DAP node but yes I uh was running Nethermind and Lighthouse and Web 3 Signer so I can quickly swap between EL's and CL's. It turns out I didn't swap as much as I normally would. Um I kept with Nethermind and Lighthouse pretty much

the entire time even when it was kind of rough at the beginning for those who were there in the early days. like not everything was just click and it just works out of the box. Now I feel like it's so easy to run a node. It's so easy to get like into this staking environment. So yeah, back then um the ones that you picked really had a big effect on how well your node would do. Um right before I brought this up because I think this is going to get lost to history. There was something called ETHP and it was a group of scammers or I'm pretty sure they were scammers who wanted to continue the proofof work chain after the merge. So they said they

were going to fork Ethereum and they were going to keep the proof of work chain going and they had all these people over like in Asia who were going to just keep the chain going and uh it turned out it didn't happen. Uh they literally just forked GE and didn't even change any of the parameters. Um, so we were we were had a good laugh at that back way back when. Um, right before the merge happened, uh, we we had some, uh, things set up, some live stream calls, and we had, uh, the merge bingo and merge drinking game. For those who remember, um, Leslie the Unicorn, everyone remember Leslie?

It was it was like basically the mascot for the merge and it was a rhino. You could get if you were a specific like staker you could get an NFTt of Leslie. So that was that was a pretty cool thing. Um we had this there's actually some people in the audience who are on the screen but this was the merge call. um Ethstaker Daily Ethereum, Cat Herders, and like two or three other organizations came together to do this gigantic live stream where um we were all monitoring the um merge.

There was uh gettogethers in Berlin. There was a um a group that was in a cabin in Wyoming. Was that right? >> Canada. In Canada. So there's the Canada team. There was Boulder, Colorado had like a group of like 30 peoples in this little room and uh yeah, it was like a three-hour stream where we watched as Ethereum changed from proof of work to proof of stake and it was like honestly I'm pretty sure I cried a little bit. It was like a huge day. Like I'm pretty sure other people did too. It was it was like a huge thing and uh I just remember feeling so proud of everyone and like us all getting there. So, uh, it was it was it was a really really big deal. When P, uh, the merge activated, you got this

cool little panda on your screen. Um, depending on what client you ran that said POS activated. Um, I just noticed this, but um, in the middle, it has the LFG let's go as the like middle bridge between the nose of the panda. I had not noticed that before. And uh yeah, this one's from Left Terrace uh from his uh Twitter because I could not find a screenshot of it anywhere else. So, what am I staking on today? I skipped a lot of like um stories from the middle of my staking career. The reason being it's a little embarrassing.

I kept my staking node offline for four months accidentally. Um in fact, Justin Drake like messaged me on Telegram and said, "Hey, I think your node's offline." I'm like, "I know. I've been really busy and um a lot of people thought that I would get slashed, but really there's not slashing when your note is offline for four months. You just get inactivity leaks that do not give you rewards. So, I did not get rewarded for a series of four months. That was okay. Um I had some stuff going on. And the reason that I had some stuff going on is my node overheated. I had the fanless node, so there was no fan.

and I kept it in my room in Texas where it gets to the hundreds degrees and it just fried the thing. Uh so would not recommend if you live in Texas having a fanless uh node setup. That is not uh something I would recommend at all. Now I have this with the Cold Wave 2.0. This is the Minis Form um Venus mini PC I guess. And it has a little fan on the bottom but it doesn't make that much noise. I love it. It's working great. This is what my DAP node looks like as of last week. So, if you're ever like maybe you're here and you're thinking of staking and you're like, I don't know what like how much RAM to get or I don't know how much like like CPU it's going

to take up and stuff like that. I went overkill on the CPU. You don't need 16 cores. I've never seen it go past like 12% on usage. Um memory, it usually hovers around 16. The only things that I have on the snap node is Lighthouse, Nethermind, and ME Boost. So, this is literally like a if you want the bare minimum, this is probably a good idea of the specs you're going to be looking at. Uh, the disk space from syncing from scratch uh maybe four months ago um is about a terabyte. I have four terabytes, so it can get as big as it wants theoretically. And then the CPU temperature um has been staying relatively pretty pretty pretty average, pretty good.

And if you've also never seen DapNote and like seeing how you can choose which clients to run, it's literally as easy as going to this screen and you click which execution client you want. You click which consensus client you want and then you pick which ME boost relays you want. And it's like stupid easy. Honestly, like anyone I feel like should be able to do this. Uh I highly highly recommend Dap Node if you all uh wants a solo stake. I zoomed through this, but I'm allowing anyone to ask me questions about this or anything else.

>> Not a question, but another little piece of history during the uh >> the po app where like everybody logged in and you tried to paint on the screen. I don't know if remembers that. >> Yes. >> But uh yeah, you should probably add that to your little >> I'll add that to the featured ones. So there was a a paint party uh where you could go and you could um >> like mark like a color on a big canvas that everyone else was marking on. And so there were different factions of people trying to draw their own thing on this canvas and it was a big beautiful like canvas art piece by the time that the merge happened and it was done.

Other questions? Hudson, you had um a unique trajectory going from Ethereum governance to working at Polygon. >> Now that you have worked at Polygon, um how would you go back to um governance and tell them like what needs to change in order to get users like Polygon more engaged in the governance process? >> Oh man, that's a good question. I would say that, you know, L2s in general have their own edict and have their own like special thing they're trying to do. So, it's really hard to merge those two

communities, but it is possible. I would say um making it exciting and fun and something that's relatable and connectable to like the L2 to the L L1 to the L2 is definitely something um I haven't seen that happen that much. That's a really good question. >> Other questions? Yeah, one more in the back here. >> As a unique OG solo staker, how you convince new people or how would you convince newbies to start solo or homestaking?

>> Yeah. Well, I just saw Jerome Dai's talk and apparently we really should not be putting any more stuff into staking. So, first of all, don't stake. No. Um, please don't clip that. Um, no. Actually, uh, I would say that, uh, I think it's a really fun exercise in learning how to use a computer in a different way. So, people who maybe run their own Minecraft server, like those are the kind of people that would be like really interested in something like this because it still has like a CIS admin type feel to it. It still has like a doing a little bit more advanced stuff with your computer. And you're making a money printing machine for the most part. like you're putting in money and then you're getting back, you know, interest over time. And so that's

definitely something that's appealing to people who are able to put in that amount of money up up front. So yeah, that's my answer, I guess. >> Thanks, Hudson. >> Uh from a networking perspective, uh have you ever been concerned about uh assuming you're running at home, >> uh like exposing your home IP address? That's a good question. There are projects that are looking at that. Um, I haven't really been that. Yeah, like what was it again?

>> VPN. >> A VPN. Yeah, there's ways to put um your your node behind a VPN or similar obfuscation. I haven't looked too deeply into it. Um, I'm not that worried because I'm just a guy. Um, I'm just a little dude and I hope that no one wants to attack me. I think if I was doing like a big staking operation, then I would be a lot more worried. Um, but yeah, to answer your question, no, I'm not worried. If I became worried, that'd be a really cool research problem for me to dig into and try to hide my IP address. If anyone actually has the answer or like is doing that currently, feel free to raise your hand and take the mic here. Who's next?

>> Hey, Hudson. I do remember that live stream. That's how I learned how to set up a note. >> Yes. >> Um, broad question, but what are you most excited about right now? whether it's related to Ethereum or I guess not. >> Um I like TE's TEES. Those are really exciting. A lot of people are on them right now because like they're misunderstanding what they can be used for in conjunction with other technologies. But um I really like the idea of this physical hardware that you can store a secret in and then only selectively get people to see the secret. It's just really interesting to me.

>> I like TE's too. What do you what like what specific use cases do you think that can be applied to? >> Um there is some use cases around um ETH2 and like staking and stuff that actually is really interesting. I I'm probably going to butcher this, but I know that there's like you can do some stuff where you're building blocks inside of TE and that was something I looked at a little bit and thought that was really really cool. Anybody else? Hey, I just want to say thanks and I'm wondering about centralization risk. So solo staking, it reduces centralization from the staking pool, but then if everyone's using DAP node, aren't we sort of like bringing that back?

>> That's a really good question. So there's different areas of centralization within the Ethereum staking ecosystem. There's everybody using the same ex execution layer clients, everyone using the same uh consensus layer clients. Those are that's like not good. There's also the operators. If one operator has too many nodes, DAP node itself is just a means to run the node. So if you're using DAP node and then there's like a bug in DAP node and all the DAP nodes go down, yeah, that is somewhat of a centralization risk. But I think that there's enough people not using DAP node at the professional level that like unfortunately solo staking and DAP node users are never going to get to a point

where if they all went offline at the same time that would cause a massive incident that I know of. Like statistically speaking, I don't believe that's the case. >> One last question here. >> What is your um issuance curve of choice? My what? >> Your issuance career of choice. Like how much issuance you would would you like to see in >> Oh gosh. Oh my god. I am not I don't do economy stuff. Um an issue. Gosh. Uh uh uh enough that we're all happy.

Thank you.