Nethermind pruning detailed, The Merge updates - The Daily Gwei Refuel #334 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where we cap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony desano and today's the 14th of march 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so actually before we get into it uh i guess just wanted to kind of like speak about what i spoke about last week on last um week's refuel episode where i asked you guys for kind of like feedback on what i should do when i'm in amsterdam or just traveling in general about the refuel had a lot of great comments both in the discord channel and on the youtube comments and i think kind of like the general consensus is that you guys are happy with me kind of like just enjoying the conference and everything like that and not forcing myself to get an episode out every day

and either doing like a a mega episode at the end of the week or doing little episodes here and there or maybe some interviews at the other conferences we'll see we'll see how it goes i think i'm just going to play it by er and see kind of like what position i'm in when i'm there uh the videos if i do them will probably come out at different times and what they do when i'm when i'm here in australia uh definitely um but i yeah i think i can probably fit in like shorter ones maybe just kind of like talking about what i what i did during the day or who i met and things like that or maybe just kind of like the most i guess pressing things or biggest kind of news from the day but i think no promises there obviously just

gonna play it by ear and see how it goes there so just wanted to address that uh and also uh the last few days i actually uh i was at the beach so i was kind of like offline in the in the discord but i read through all the comments when i got back home today um but yeah if i wasn't active on there and you know you kind of like pinged me on that i missed it sorry about that i was just taking some much-needed time off uh i guess like after the craziness especially during covert times but yeah i'm very excited to get back into the travel more generally here but anyway on to what happened over the weekend so i know i spoke last week about i guess i spent 10 minutes last week talking kind of like about the fact that i don't think

governments are going to outright ban crypto and things like that uh but i did forget to i guess uh talk about one thing and that's proof of work and and proof of work's kind of like place in the world of crypto the world in general and how i've said for a very long time that i think proof of work is that one thing that governments are going to go after um due to its energy usage now i'm not here to tell you that it's energy usage bad or he's good or if anyone can even say that right i'm not i'm not debating that but there was this news that came out uh of the eu that said from the block that says new amendments on eu crypto legislation put forward could limit proof of work cryptocurrencies and from what i've seen it seems some of the

wording looks like this could be i guess kind of a ban on proof of work in in the eu and things like that and this again it's just a proposal it's not proposed legislation it's not law yet it hasn't been kind of like put in yet but i've been talking about this for a while now if you've been listening to the refuel about how i thought proof of work was going to come under attack um you know due to the esg concerns due to kind of like i guess um you know wanting to get off kind of like using so much energy wanting to get to more renewable energies and things like that and now of course due to the conflict with ukraine and russia the eu definitely wants to speed up its uh you know uh getting off russian oil right which i guess is

totally fair right when you consider the circumstances um and then you know i saw some people saying that if they do this to proof of work they're coming from proof of stake next i don't think that's the case um you know maybe they come for proof of stake under a different kind of like pretext but i i don't know i just don't i don't i just don't see it like you can't go after proof of stake for energy usage of course and if you if you were to go after proof of stake as a government you'd be doing it uh under some other kind of like pretext but i'm not sure what the government would come up with to kind of like justify it maybe they'll they'll say that you know but basically they would have to say that they don't want these networks to exist at all and then

that becomes maybe an outright ban on crypto obviously very hard to police especially with proof of stake because um the one benefit one major benefit of proof of stake is that it's very hard to track down the validators um now obviously a lot of people are going to have validators in the cloud and things like that and they're relatively easy to shut down but all the home stake is i mean how do you really track them i mean you know as law enforcement you probably have like an easier job but there are ways to kind of like hide your presence and things like that and make you pretty much untraceable and the funny thing is with proof of work with the mega mines you can easily find those you just look for the things drawing the most power it's either a you know a drug operation or a crypto

mining operation very easy to find it based on heat signatures too uh whereas with proof of stake with with validators uh especially in ethereum proof of stake it's much much more difficult so um i guess like this is still consistent with what i was saying last week uh and kind of like what i've been saying for a while now about proof of work i don't know if this would pass like an outright ban i feel like it might be a bit of a cat and mouse game where certain countries within the eu basically say no we don't want miners here i just kind of like what china did um and kind of like kick the miners out but the people are still able to use crypto right uh so from that point of view i wouldn't call a crypto ban or anything like that i wouldn't

even call it a proof of work ban i would just uh i would just say that you know these countries are basically like well you're using too much energy we're going to basically tell you to you know to leave the country right um i don't even know if ban would be the right word there and maybe you know it's kind of like funny when you think about this sort of stuff because it's like okay well you know i'm not trying to defend proof of work i've actually been a pretty big critic of proof of work in the past but you know if you start regulating things based on how much energy they use it gets murky because then you kind of look at all the other things that are using energy and you know a lot of them use more than bitcoin and then you kind of

like weigh up okay well you know what's that value to society there uh and then you kind of get into the subjective view of things and you start policing who gets access to energy and who doesn't uh and you kind of start interfering in the free market of energy which is obviously one of the biggest markets in the world and everyone you know needs electricity needs energy so it becomes very very murky there so i'm going to keep an eye on this see what happens here you know a few of the lawyers out there on crypto are definitely concerned about this but you know the funny thing about the lawyers is that some of them like they're really smart and really like them really good guys but they tend to take the most extreme position on any issue i think that might just be the

nature of of kind of like the way they look at things whereas i like to take the more maybe pragmatic approach to things and maybe more optimistic view where i don't believe that they think these things are going to play out and if they do play out in in kind of like a similar way to what's proposed it's never as bad as people make it out to be like the bitcoin mining ban i mean that results in a pretty big dump and all that sort of stuff but it hasn't killed bitcoin i'm pretty sure bitcoin's hash rate is still at all-time highs the miners just moved out and kind of like continued on from there uh i i don't you know i don't think these things are ever as uh i guess like bad as people make it make them out to be and that's kind of

like a universal rule that i go by whether it's stuff like you know government's cracking down on crypto or anything to do with crypto or just things happening within the industry itself whenever you you kind of like see people kind of like i guess uh try to tell you a narrative that something's gonna be way worse than what it ends up being uh you know i i kind of think that uh it's kind of like our y2k moments that always happen and and i think if you kind of like view it like that you can stay grounded and you won't kind of like get scared i mean at the end of the day people everyone's trying to sell you a narrative uh especially because there's markets that revolve around these things bears are trying to sell you a narrative saying oh look this is going to crash the price bulls are

trying to sell you a narrative that says this is going to pump the price and then we obviously reach the fair market price at any given time through an equilibrium of all that information being however input into the market and then when there's an information imbalance you see kind of like the volatility kind of uh spread out you see kind of like opportunities and you see what we call alpha right but that's i guess going off a little bit of topic here but i didn't want to just mention this because it was relevant to what i was talking about last week all right so speaking of i guess proof of work and proof of stake uh some updates on the merge so marios from the geth team has kept us updated on what's happening with the killen test net uh i guess merge test net here so this was on

march 12th uh i guess like on on on saturday or friday or whatever that was uh and he said we need to push the ttd back and now i explained last week what the ttd is is basically the the terminal difficulty when the merge happens it's not based on a block number it's based on uh the difficulty getting to a certain point and then the merge happening from there so uh you know due to some minors on the testnet mining with gpus it's uh it's kind of like i guess uh uh i sped up the merge too quickly and essentially from what i understand the merge or at least um the ttd on the proof of work chain would hit before the beacon chain went live before that you know the kill and test net beacon chain went live and as mario says here this is a good drill for for the

quarterback developers and researchers as it tests how an issue on mainnet in the last second can be mitigated and there's a bunch of kind of like uh uh updates in this thread or i guess like information in this thread from mario so you can read through uh but this is i mean this is really cool i actually like that we've been able to test it and this is not something that i think can happen on maynet given the fact that we already have a live beacon chain right uh th this can only happen on the testnet because the beacon chain wasn't live it hasn't hadn't reached its genesis period yet so i think when you look at look at it like that this is not something that i i'm pretty sure it's impossible to happen on main net but still it's good to test these things

it's good to kind of like get them out there test all the possible edge cases everything you know everything surrounding it even if it's impossible to happen on main net because then it just informs um different things later on and it informs things around test nets and informs uh developers on on any kind of like future things that are happening here so very cool to see this and definitely go give this thread for marios to read for more information on that uh and speaking of the merge as well tim bico here announced that uh they're calling the execution layer merge client paris so uh the consensus layer uh merge clients were named that's balatrix uh now the execution layer client name will be paris here so just a quick announcement there and last thing about the merge we have a great post from super fears in on

reddit called five indicators that the ethereum merge will occur in june 2022 now the first one is that on february 19 2022 ethereum researcher uh danny ryan gave a talk at eighth denver titled a theorem proof of stake in our solar pane future it's the one i told you guys to watch last week and then superfood says here at minute 13 30 he asked himself the question so when and proceeds to answer it and then he goes on about like the difficulty bomb when that's going to be set off and you know sometime in june of course right uh then there was another call on march 10 2022 about the consensus layer uh call here um and then ben edgington uh asked danny ryan why the kill and test net was pushed back 10 days um and you know danny said just a quick recap on why it

was pushed back 10 days or so because i know sorry ben said just a quick recap and why it was pushed back 10 days or so because this is not what we agreed at the last meeting danny's answer is that they were completing some technical items and needed to engage the wider community but it's really the question that's more telling as superfood says yeah the fact that the implementers are counting days tells us that they are working diligently to meet the june goal uh the merge main net readiness checklist is nearing completion um another um comment on march 10th here from marius who announced the launch of the killing public merge test uh merch test net which i've said before is the uh the widely expected final test net here and the difficulty bomb is specified in eip4345 and suggests that the time between blocks will begin increasing

around june 2022 because the bomb goes off slowly and is based on block numbers it's difficult to predict what the slow motion explosion will look like in real time uh and blah blah you know more information about the difficulty bomb here so these are really good indicators all things obviously i've mentioned on the on the kind of like refuel before actually not all of them i don't think i mentioned the um or the the first one here about danny ryan making that comment and then and then the question being answered on the on the second point here um but you know that's that's some good sleuthing there from super fees that's for sure but yeah i mean i i'm with him here i think it's it's more than the 50 chance that we're going to see the the merge in june at this point in time i think the kill and

test net is going well obviously we had a bit of a speed bump there with the um the ttd and stuff like that but as i said that doesn't affect anything on main net it's just getting the merge kind of like done on on the test net in the proper way um and you know i i i just have you know as the days go by i get more and more confident in a june merged day but that doesn't mean that i you know we can't kind of like uh get i guess so to speak rugged at the last at the last kind of like second there and the devs and rachel's say no no unfortunately we can't do it in june and it's going to be pushed back to july or august so don't be surprised if that happens either but uh i'm i'm still pretty confident in in

june at this stage would i put money on it maybe maybe it depends how much money right um but you know the closer we get i guess the better it is and i wonder if there's a prediction market for these because the way they work is that the closer you get and the more the odds kind of like turn it's it's kind of like you can you can sell or buy shares based on that so i'm wondering if there is one right now if there is and you know of it definitely link it to me uh somewhere discord youtube twitter wherever all right uh just a quick uh i guess note on client diversity here so as i mentioned dapnode was working on client diversity last week so and this is a an update from eduardo here who says client diversity on dap node is going to happen

very very soon and they can't be more excited about it now this was on march 12 2022 and you can see there's a screenshot here of the different clients that you could use within dap node i'm sure this is coming it could come this week right it could come next week but very very soon usually it usually doesn't mean i mean he's put a tm here but it usually doesn't mean too much longer than one to two weeks i would imagine so very cool to see that looking forward to that to seeing that go live all right so ismail here from the nethermind team shared a blog post uh announcing nethermine's full pruning mechanism that is here now now for those of you who don't know what pruning is it's all described in this blog post here but just a quick kind of like i

guess tldr and what it is basically uh ethereum kind of like uh full nodes oh sorry full archive nodes are uh i guess more approaching 10 terabytes or have exceeded 10 terabytes in storage at this stage at this stage um and you know obviously that's not feasible for most users to run so instead users will run a pruned node instead so that prune node is still considered ethereum full node it just doesn't have all the data or i guess all the information available that an archive node has and i guess the simplest way to explain this is that the ethereum full node will still tell you that everything you know is working is working fine all the data is correct and everything like that but it won't tell you kind of like what you know what happened when so for example

an ethereum full node will not tell you what the token balance of your wallet was at some date in the past it will tell you what the current token balance is say you have 10 eighth right now it'll tell you that you have 108 in your wallet or it will say that there's 10 in this ethereum address but it won't tell you that maybe there was five ethernet address six months ago uh but an archive node will an archicad will literally show you everything every state of the blockchain at any point of time at every block essentially so that is obviously useful for things like block explorers and infrastructure providers but not used not useful for the everyday person like i personally besides needing it for maybe tax purposes which you can just get from from ether scan i don't need to run an archive note because i'm never really

caring about that information outside of that um and and then you know a full kind of like prune node works just just fine but the reason why this is a breakthrough from from nethermind is that traditionally uh to activate a prune node you would have to kind of like go offline you know do the pruning on your full node and then come back online whereas with what nethermine has been able to to kind of like put together here their client can now perform full pruning um keeping the size of the database only as big as completely necessary all while running the node in full capacity so you don't need to take your node offline or anything like that it just happens all in the background while it's running so that is a huge breakthrough guys i don't know how technical a lot of you guys are

if you're aware of this thing or kind of like you've been monitoring this but take it from me this is a very very big deal uh and this is actually going to help ethereum kind of like continue to grow and computer scale as time goes on as well and allow us to maybe even increase the gas limit too right on top of the eips that are coming in and stuff like that so just wanted to kind of highlight that for you guys definitely go check out the blog post it's more technical than everything that i've said here it gives like a full breakdown of everything you know the the background or pruning how how um nevermind's full pruning works and all that sort of stuff here so very very cool to see this as i mentioned before nevermind is a kick-ass team they're doing a lot of great work uh

across not just ethereum core development but a bunch of other verticals there so great to see them continuing to to to put out more stuff that helps the ethereum ecosystem all right so optimism has put together a blog post called on our pragmatic path to decentralization so this is basically what you know that kind of like part path that they're taking towards decentralizing the optimistic ethereum network uh they go through i guess a bit of background about why the l2s are not decentralized right now obviously because of the training wheels the multi-sigs the admin keys all that sort of stuff they look to ethereum about you know in in how kind of like ethereum has done it um and it seems that uh optimism wants to essentially do like a multi-client architecture approach which is pretty

cool i mean i think that uh i don't know if any other l2 has kind of like talked about this or announced this before but it seems like optimism really just wants to basically follow exactly what ethereum is except as a rollup instead of kind of like a layer one consensus engine or sentiment engine it wants to just do this as an execution layer but basically stick as close as they can to ethereum in all aspects not just the code but also kind of things like multi-client architecture development process all that sort of stuff there so that's that's very cool to see uh and then you know they talk a bit more about other things kind of like you know how they're decentralizing now and stuff like that um and obviously there's going to be a token at some point in here somewhere which is which is going to i'm

assuming be used to further decentralize things as well uh but this is cool i mean it's cool to see layer 2 is kind of like taking the multi-client architecture approach as well i'm not just sticking to one client here as i mentioned before ethereum's multi-client architecture makes ethereum one of the most if not the most resilient crypto networks on the planet like if there was a major bug in for example geth we still have other kind of like core clients out there that could be run and could keep the network alive and this has kind of like happened in the past uh obviously geth is like a big part of the network and that's why client diversity matters and things like that and we're working on that right especially with the beacon chain but i think looking at all that holistically it's uh it makes a lot of sense for

optimism to to do this so i'm hoping other kind of like l2s follow along with this i'm sure they will right i'm sure they're kind of like gonna pay money for developers to build these sorts of stuff to maintain it the long-term viability and health of these clients is also something that i guess um needs to be incentivized you'll remember that the ethereum foundation put together a client incentive program or client diversity incentive program where they you know gave a bunch of ethos validators to the different uh beacon chain kind of like client teams and also the execution layer teams to encourage them to keep building it out to keep sustaining it and to have a vested interest in it with ether not just with each but also with validators so that was really cool to see as well i think the same thing is going to have to

happen for the l2s where i'm sure they'll have their native tokens they'll give them out as kind of rewards or they'll pay them out and and then kind of like keep them happy keep them funded because that is the most important thing like the funny thing is is that we did have another major client in ethereum called parody a while ago maybe some of you aren't even aware of that like parody was from day one and parody actually saved ethereum's ass in uh in 2016 during the shanghai dos attacks and then what ended up happening is that the uh parody company started building polkadot they became more focused on that and they kind of like i guess sunsetted parity and they tried to and then gnosis tried to kind of like revive it and keep it alive and things like that but then that ended up kind of

like fizzling and then they changed it to to another ethereum client uh and i kind of kind of called aragon now which is still being maintained still i mean sorry it was open ethereum first which has also been deprecated and now there's eragon which is kind of like a mixture of the of things there but yeah i mean there's been a journey that's for sure and i think that obviously finding you know what what was involved there as well but it was also the fact that parity just had a conflict of interest now the polka dot obviously is it is a separate blockchain that'll rather work on that than working on ethereum that's just the way it is but we had others step up on to the plate such as mind bass suit and aragon which was cool to see uh and obviously you know on the

execution and consensus layer side as a whole we're gonna have to keep incentivizing that uh to happen but cool to see this from optimism definitely go check out the blog post i'll link it in the youtube description all right so sudo theos has announced that uh he he will be putting together a newsletter called resync which is going to be a bi-weekly update zk sync newsletter uh out bi-weekly right this is cool i mean i mentioned misses newsletter about starkware recently and now pseudotheosis are on about zk sync i think there's a few out there for arbitrary optimism at this point uh but yeah i mean it's just crazy i'm subscribed to all of these things i got them in my inbox and i go through them like holy like i don't even have time to keep up with everything happening and i i know i've

i've talked about this to death but really guys like it's just crazy the l2 space i mean keeping up with each of these l2 ecosystems at this point is like keeping up with uh an entire ecosystem being off itself and all this stuff is built on ethereum so like i'm trying to keep up with ethereum i'm trying to keep up with optimism arbitrary zk sync polygon stockwear every other bloody l2 out there it's impossible i know i do a daily show but i mean i could literally extend this out to at least an hour these days on the show if i individually covered everything and it's just obviously not feasible there but crazy so highly recommend uh subscribing to this new resync newsletter from pseudotheos i've talked about studio theaters before highly recommended follow as well let's get them 10 000 followers guys they're

at 6752 right now they do a lot of great work uh not just with uh with kind of like this recent newsletter but also with a bunch of um educational threads about sharding layer two stuff uh kind of like um uh uh i guess statelessness and things like that as well so definitely go give them a follow let's get them to 10k uh i would really love to see that because anyone who spreads knowledge like that deserves more followers in my minds um so yeah go ahead and do that it'll be linked in the youtube description below all right so this was i think the biggest news of the last few days from yuga labs i think that's how you say it uh the creators of board 8 yup club they have purchased or acquired the crypto punks and me beats collections from lava

labs now the first thing they did is that they gave full commercial rights to the nft holders just like they did for board ape yacht club and mutant eight yacht club which i think is a cool thing to do but this caused a lot of division in the i guess nft community some really liked this some thought it was really bad because it just means things are consolidating i don't have a strong opinion on this at all because i don't have a strong opinion on nfts in general i think that um i i think that the board ape stuff was like absolutely crazy i saw it kind of like grow from from basically nothing to where it is today it was it kind of became like a bit of a cultural phenomenon for better or worse but i think i just wanted to focus on

how funny it is that lava labs have made so much money off of all this sort of stuff over the years and now they're just noping out right they did nothing with me bits i think they made like 80 million dollars from me bits from selling them uh they also owned a lot of crypto punks which they have sold now to you labs they sold i guess like their um their mee bits and crypto punks collections uh and not their auto glyphs but like those sorts of things there they've made so much money from this and like i don't know i've seen some reports that they basically made billions from all of this which is just crazy and now they're kind of like noping out they're like well okay let's just sell to you labs and then we have to do anything anymore and you know let's go up into

the sunset i mean cool like i don't you know necessarily think there's anything wrong with that but i think this speaks to a broader kind of like thing within crypto where there are some teams that make up too much money or raise too much money and then they lose all motivation to actually build the product that they set out to build this has happened time and time again within crypto obviously it hasn't happened recently it's been it hasn't just happened recently it's been going on for quite a while especially during the ico mania but put it this way if you raise 100 million dollars in your first race and this happened quite frequently during the ico mania um what incentive do you have to build the product like unless you're some kind of like founder who really has something to prove and they really want to build an

amazing product and you know you don't care about money at all you just raise the money to kind of like build your product then fine but those people are few and far between you raise 100 million dollars you put a skeleton crew on it to make it look like you're actually working on it and then you go and sip kind of like martinis in the bahamas right like that happens so often and just it doesn't happen loudly it happens quietly and you probably don't hear about it too much but it definitely happens guys and i think that this is the number one mistake a lot of teams make and i i actually like it when i see teams uh especially during the early races like obviously there are mega races in kind of like later stages like series some series a series b and series c

but in kind of like the pre-seed and seed and maybe even series c series a um kind of like uh i guess raises that you should not be raising as a team more money than you need uh for at least like a few years runway because it just becomes kind of like a thing of well i have all this money now you know let's just go off into the sunset especially if you raise from the public and you know you're not very accountable to the public you're very accountable to vcs and funds and things like that they may have legal recourse but you're not accountable to the public at all really and that's another reason why a lot of public sales don't happen these days is because um you know it gets messy because the public can band together and sue you and things like that and you have to go

through the whole court arbitration process uh but generally uh yeah i mean you uh lava labs is not like they sold to me bits and that's it like i said eight million dollars worth of me bits they're not they have no obligation to do anything for the community the community can't sue them for it can't say all your promises you promised that because they didn't really promise anything people assume that they did so even if they promise to do something as part of a road map it's not legally binding or anything like that so there's nothing really people can do at the end of the day um so so yeah i guess like just a bit of general i guess observations maybe advice to first time founders out there don't raise too much money in your first kind of like rounds um you know try to keep it nice and lean and tight

because it just gives you the motivation to to kind of like stay hungry to keep building the product out to make something great and if you're a founder or a developer um you know wanting to be a founder or anything like that out there and you just want to build something you don't give a about money i mean more power to you you are i guess like uh you know the people the people we want in crypto but i mean 99 of people aren't like that and that's why most things kind of that's one reason why most things fail most projects fail um but obviously there's a lot of other reasons um but yeah just wanted to kind of give some context there as i said don't have strong opinions about the acquisition itself it's cool it's whatever you know this stuff's going to keep happening

guys so whether you like it or not you know you're going to have to learn to deal with it maybe um but yeah i think on that note it's going to be it for today so thank 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 the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone