State of the Stake with Superphiz #46

Transcript

[Music] hey superfizz here uh it has been a long time since i've done a state of the state i don't really even know if this is called state of the state i just got in the shower and i was like you know i should really do it uh i'm visiting people so there's a dog and yelling people in the background but i wanted to kind of go over this thing um i don't want to talk about why i haven't done state of state it just hasn't been on me um and so but i have had this thing that's that's kind of getting to me that i want to talk about and it is the progress of the beacon chain there are so many different terms

swarming around that it can be really difficult to keep track of what's going on with the beacon chain and what's the status so as you probably know the beacon chain is running very well we continue to have an issue with client diversity and we're looking at ways to improve client diversity primarily through working from my end by working with colfax and steakhouse we have onboarded a lot of developers there who are striving for a december goal to release a multi-platform gui client i don't exactly know how this is going to unfold but i do have so much faith in colfax and that team

essentially to lower the bar to access staking at home and beyond that to switch clients uh which is really a big deal a lot of i hear a lot of people like hey superfiz why do you think client diversity is so low well client diversity is low because switching is hard when you learn one staking platform like you learn prism you're afraid to stop what you're doing and switch to lighthouse or switch to teku or switch to prism because of that risk involved like you got it running once why would you take a risk on setting it up again i totally get that and that's one of the reasons i'm like screaming hey we need to make transferring clients easier

don't let anyone put that onus on you as an end user um you've done your work i'm so glad you're staking if you haven't started staking please join us but the onus for client diversity really lies in graphical easy to use clients that make client switching easy and that diversity also lies with pools who have typically chosen the easiest route so maybe they're using uh the same client they started with and those pools really account for a large market share of um staking client diversity so i don't want you to give up but i don't want you to feel like it's on you it's really on maybe the developer community the open

source developer community places like steakhouse who can help bring you a better product and there are several groups working with steakhouse right now i don't want to go too deep into that because i really want to refer you over to colfax and steakhouse but they have a lot going on and i really feel like by december whether or not they meet this goal i really think they're going to have a lot coming out but the thing i wanted to talk about is what's going on with the beacon chain so the beacon chain is humming along and as you know in the london upgrade or you may know i don't know there was an eip to delay the difficulty bomb which is a thing that kind of slows the

ethereum network down and that thing was delayed until december 1st the difficulty bomb is a thing that kind of forces developers to do occasional upgrades without that it would be so easy to put off upgrades longer and longer and longer but with that difficulty bomb it means something has to be done whether or not improvements are included that's up for debate but the simple fact is a upgrade has to be done when the difficulty bomb goes off and that's set for around december 1st and so uh in the week or two after december 1st the network will slow to a crawl if it's not upgraded in some way now that december 1st date is very interesting because you'll

see that the beacon chain merge also has potential to happen december 1st and what we saw today is the pyrmont test net for the beacon chain was upgraded to the altair hard fork now this is a big deal because it's the first test of upgrading the beacon chain i try not to use the word hard fork but that's that's what is hard forks scare people i will probably always choose to use the word upgrade but alter is the first upgrade to the beacon chain and what the developers need to know what the implementers need to know is that

the chain can be upgraded there will be issues there will be upgrades and what they need to do is know that that process for upgrading the beacon chain is smooth and seamless and so that test went off the hitch today altair was implemented on the pyrmont test net now pyrmont has been around a long time and with this upgrade piermont is officially being deprecated if you're using pyramid nobody can kick you off because we're on a permissionless network but you shouldn't expect to see any more upgrades to puremont uh however if you're interested in testing the the new altair fork which honestly is an end user you're not going to see any difference it's just whether or not the the upgrade went off uh you can

still uh try altair i'm sorry try puremont i really wouldn't suggest it but the next so for all all intents and purposes pyrmont is now gone it has been upgraded to altair um and you can forget it and to give you some vocabulary piermont is the the old test net for the beacon chain altair is the name of the first upgrade being added to the beacon chain so altair will be added to all of the uh chains and piermont was just first the next ch the nest next test net is prater prater is the current live test

net for the beacon chain so let's say you want to be a validator you would spit up a validator on um prater to test first prater is primarily run by the uh implementers by the implement implementation teams so like each implementation team has you know a thousand validators running the purpose of that is so that the community won't abandon validators and essentially break the network so we can we can know with pretty good certainty that nothing the end user base will do will destroy crater so play with it have fun create validators on it you do need girly ether and that is testnet ether to run a validator on the

prater test net and gurley is the test net for eth1 so essentially you get 32 gurley ether and then you deposit that to the contract on the praetor test net to then be a validator on the praetor test net now gurley is a little scarce right now and i think the best thing to do is maybe check out one of the faucets or find a girly whale or if you if you hang out in one of the reddits uh maybe like eath staker or e-finance or in the east stake or discord um you can become known enough that that someone will

share yuri ether with you because of the farming problem you kind of have to have some bit of a personal knowledge or connection in order to get it that's not hard just get to know somebody make yourself known um and you can get girl ether i think the mudded faucet for girly is still running so that is all about the prater test net which is the current main test net for the beacon chain and it is expected to be a long-lived test net so you can expect prater to run at least a couple years the next step will be running the altair upgrade on the prader

test net since altair went fine on the old pyrmont test net the next step will be to run altair on prater test net and after that's successful then the altair upgrade will be run on the beacon chain main net the next step down the road from that is the merge which as i said does have the possibility of happening in december of 2021 that's in four months here's the thing in my mind the boxes are checked and they they do

line up the reason i don't think it's gonna happen is because in my experience so this is not in my mind but in my experience even when all the big boxes are checked there are so many loose ends before this this kind of thing really happens so much coordination and so much um questioning and double checking and rechecking that i would be mildly surprised if the merge happened in december 2021 even though i do believe that it's possible uh and so what i'm saying is the window for that merge in in the most

reasonable scenario uh is gonna be i was gonna say october i don't i just there would be more signaling if it were october so probably between december 2021 and june 2022 i think it's going to be before june but i think it's important for us to buckle in and recognize that it can be a longer wait than we expect it's probably going to be a longer wait than we expect every time the community is like hey we're ready everything's done let's do this we always discover that the people with cooler heads find the need to

dot more eyes and cross more teas before these transitions go off smoothly and i do think it's going to go off smoothly i'm very excited about it but yeah that's where i am i just wanted to kind of give this thousand-yard overview of where we are um i don't know if i've missed doing state of the state i like doing it but uh it does give me a little bit of stress sometimes i don't want to feel pressured to do it so yeah i'll keep doing it when it's fun and uh yeah good talking to you all i hope you have a great day