What's new in Eth2 - 20 May 2022 with Ben Edgington and superphiz

Transcript

hey everyone i'm superfiz from the east staker community and i'm here with my good friend ben edgington hey ben hi hi fez hi everybody uh ben writes this incredible newsletter every fortnight called that means every two weeks in america but i'm trying to use it uh called what's new in eth2 uh his latest edition is from the 20th of may 2022 was it about three days ago um and it's it's a banger uh yeah thank you i can't remember what i wrote so i'm looking forward to to seeing it again learning all about it um so let's get into it uh let's see the ethereum staking see i'm going to

close my tabs to the right because we're going to reopen probably all those let's see close tabs to the right um so the ethereum's taking clr round has about 10 up sorry maybe 30 hours left uh one day six hours 30 hours this is great yeah i wanted to pick this out as the as a highlight just because it's something uh so different and so cool um and there's a serious you know sometimes with the kind of git coin grants it recently the amounts involved are relatively small for most projects you know for a few projects so they get a huge amount of matching funds but the matching funds are spread pretty thin because they're just thousands of projects now you've got 15 projects here

and what 350 well over four what's it all add up to now the total 414 000 die between 15 projects is is incredible right i mean that's you know seriously uh game-changing amounts of of uh funds yeah you're looking at about 25k average per project and obviously um you know the purpose of a quadratic funds round is not really to solicit money from participants it is to um use that die as a signal for where how the money should be distributed to these projects and so it's an incredible initiative i'm really glad that clr fund and the ethereum foundation um asked us

to participate and it's going really well yeah uh i can't i'm gonna mention you had like 2 000 contributors when i wrote three days ago uh now 3300 which it just astonishes me how big this community is now um i just blows my mind um and you know to be fair it's not easy you got to get um authenticated with bright id which is a bit of a kind of hoop to jump through and then if you haven't got funds on arbitrage which i didn't uh you got to kind of mess around with all that uh and um you know get some dye in there and things um 3 300 people this is this is mind blowing

yeah i'm i'm pretty uh pretty impressed with it myself and i love so many of these projects i'm i'm in this weird place where i want to promote the things that i'm most excited about but i don't feel like that's um as an organizer of of the round i don't think that's maybe in the best interest of the community but i i really do hope people come here and and just give um i i'm calling them signals because it is die but that's not the die that matters it's the signal that says hey i'm a real person i'm verified on bright id and i think this is valuable so hey ef can you give them just give them 10k that's no big deal right um and they get money to to do their thing

and it benefits all of us so it's incredible so you've had a couple of new ones since i last looked i think logic beach is staking explainer series and maybe the um ethereum uh china network uh whatever they call ethereum.cn i don't think i saw before so there's a chance correct me if i'm wrong but there's a chance before the end of the round to reallocate funds that you've already allocated you can't put more in right but you're trying to reallocate that's right you get the caveats you can only make one deposit and you can reshuffle that um until i think it's about a day or two after uh this time left is over so um

you know i actually didn't even know that myself so i made i deposited 60 by and i'm like okay i'll get the first round then i'll come back later and deposit more and it's like nope sorry you're done but that 60 die is plenty to uh to signal um with my account where i feel like this these contributions should go we get stuck in that thing where we think my money is is the contribution and your money really is just the signal yeah yeah i found when i checked out i there were 15 projects at the time and i put like 12 of them in my basket i felt bad about missing missing three out but i thought i had prioritized then it said oh you can only do eight and so in the end yeah in the end probably i

should have just dumped funds into the matching pool but uh because they're all good i mean you know there wasn't any project here which i thought no they didn't you know they don't need my money yeah and there's one last thing i want to point out um you can use this add funds button um to make a contribution without completing bright id um and without specifically vouching for any product so if you click this button and let's try it um i don't think i have metamask on this browser it's just going to ask you it's going to give you a dialog to let you deposit whatever you want and it just goes right to this matching pool um and it will be it will be distributed by the quadratic matching formula um so that's a good way for people to

participate if they're not comfortable with broad id i love bright id um it's it's whatever i i don't have i don't have a ton of time to like extol it's virtue but i'm obsessed with it excellent good so congrats on that thanks for the opportunity to talk about it uh let's see so the mega merge resource list i love this this is trent is that right uh yes seems to be trent yeah this is this is great uh yeah i should have known about this before but um all the links are there uh all good stuff yeah so it can be really hard uh if you you know you're maybe a week behind um

it can be hard to keep up and this this kind of resource is just fantastic for catching up on everything yeah totally uh she jen who i've been following on twitter for a while she's kind of spicy and interesting um so she had a great thread on getting involved in sessioning the merge testing the merge i i have a confession to make i read all this and i thought great i need to get in there and start testing the merge and i've been trying to get funds from the kiln faucet ever since since friday and i've and for some reason i'm not able to get anything so i'm having a bit of a problem do you know there's a backup kiln faucet and we should probably publicize that more perry kind of says

that every time um every time the bots get to the faucet uh he just sets up another one because it takes them a while to retool and find a new one um that that actually brings me to um it's not in here but bright id is setting up on a bright id authenticated faucet um and i'm trying to get them to incorporate kiln and in that event people who are bright id authenticated can say hey give me some kiln uh eth and um that's a great way to slow the bots down but also get it to people who need yeah that would be awesome um yeah be good to get in there so there's um for those who managed to get some kiln eth and do some um

activities like deploying contracts or sending transactions uh nfts are coming so this is uh abdel um abdelhamid bakter who used to be one of my colleagues in consensus worked on baisu this is his project to um yeah just nice send some nfts for for those who uh complete some of these uh tasks these missions um here hey so um i i should get slashed i i made a video showing my um showing my my wallet address and i'm like someone certainly will love me enough to slash that for me but i'm still waiting on a slashing

excellent have you done the others well i was just looking at that i think i've done one or two transactions i certainly haven't done 100 i can probably script that um i haven't deployed any contracts i'm definitely a validator so i think i can get a few of these i i didn't um oh are we at this block yet do we know uh i don't think so the kiln explorer was down last time i checked so um i did a back of the envelope based on the gens this time and uh we still had a few days to go yeah we got like five six thirty one oh yeah like forty forty thousand

slots i'm not gonna embarrass myself for trying to work that out right it's some time in the future yeah it's it's still that's a great opportunity to get involved so i'm glad they're doing that i've also heard of some other uh gossip about you know nfts or even poe apps that will go to um kiln validators so that's a great opportunity um and we've actually just pulled up this landing page for kiln i do love those shadow forks we're getting there aren't we yeah it's becoming routine we're doing uh shadow fork six maintenance shadow fork six is due next week i think on the 31st maybe sometime around that so just planning the configs on that

uh four and five um so we did main shadow fork three when we're all together in amsterdam uh and then four and five cents and basically you know there's always some slightly rough edge but you know um not generally they haven't been merge related they've been sort of other sync issues you know clients haven't got synced up in time or have found a bug in in something pre-merged um or there's been some configuration issue like uh you know they didn't give tech enough memory or something i mean you know um so they've been a few little uh rough edges but um 99 percent good so really very very encouraging i mean if it had been based

if the last shadow fork may not shadow fall could be the real thing you know i think we would have been delighted we would have broken out champagne it was quite funny on the devs call um the we had the the shadow form took place just a couple of minutes before the court and uh we were looking at you know people were in in the chat box and it's like oh it's not making blogs or no transactions [Laughter] debugging but turned out to be uh explorer issue and actually if you consulted the notes themselves it was all perfect it was all fine i i caught the tail into that and i was like well crap just kiss august goodbye let's let's aim for september now but it's great yeah it's it's good that

it was a a ruse issue my camera isn't focusing not that anyone else cares but so yeah that was awesome um perry is just awesome um and so yeah they're not even uh marius they're not even telling us anymore because we're assuming success every time yeah yeah i think uh that that's right i mean something goes wrong we'll hear about it but now these things are just kind of like yeah another one and they we assume they're gonna go well yeah and so robsten is on target hey so i have i'm kind of under the

understanding that we're gonna look for six events uh and so you can correct me if i'm wrong because this is what i'm thinking robsten sepolia gurley bellatrix paris ttd right that sounds yep yep um yeah nothing to add i think okay yeah i just i wanted to make sure that i had it in my head right um because as as the community we're starting to plan like these calls and that's that's a lot of stuff to cover and so um i'm excited to uh to hang out and watch these all as a big community six events is is about it's almost enough to cover the merge right

i think yeah those are those are the big milestones yeah oh boy uh so let's see roxton on on june 8th then polio is going to be permissioned and then gurley is the third major test net to merge yeah we have we haven't said a kind of strict timeline uh yet um for the other two so roxton is 8th of june uh what will i imagine we'll do them at two week intervals so um by the very beginning of july we'll have done at gurley i i've resisted the urge to uh pencil it out you need to be like hmm two weeks from there and two weeks from there because i always know like it's it's never it's never gonna happen like you

think it is unless it does right yeah never are you running roxton uh no i'm not either i i do have robston east so i might uh i still have a couple days to hop on that i might do it yeah yeah i should probably uh get something up and running just just if only to get better visibility you just get a better view of the network if you're on your own the the explorers that have been set up invariably fall over one way or another so it's sometimes it's just better to have your own node to consult and you know as a home validator it's just a great opportunity to engage in the process to uh just sort of feel it out like maybe it's it's my obsession with just

experiencing all of these chain events but i i just enjoy doing that i yeah that's what it's all about we can all join in it's permissionless consensus txrx transmission receive research team is maintaining test the merge yeah the name came from this is the old days when we that's a team that initially started work on tekku and it's texans and russians and so i think johnny ray johnny ray called it txrx that's funny because it's also transmit received vernacular now it's all russians um so it's just the rx bit survives but uh this is mikhail and anton and others um

and so this is just happens to be their repo and mikhail has just put together a nice summary of the remaining tests that need to be integrated into hive and it's good cool uh let's see when merge so i i don't i'm not familiar with this tweet oh of course i'm familiar with this tweet who's not familiar with this tweet yeah so i'm actually i'm gonna see if i can turn my audio on and we'll listen to this for once uh just a second yeah the the recording is terrible audio pause recording reactions share sound and president uh does that strike fear with you are you optimistic so david's

asking preston about june 8th i'm ready let's do it no no yep big applause and as far as we know if everything goes according to plan august it just makes sense and the difficulty bomb is there and it's there for this reason specifically so if we don't have to move it let's let's do it as soon as we can uh has that been articulated anywhere else other than the stage before today yes i think i figured it all out yeah kind of all of us have been like um now how about august

so it's great you heard it in what's unique two two weeks ago i mean this is what i um projected so uh there we go yeah it's neat you know consensus really is forming um yeah we're getting there it's it's great to hear uh implementer implementation developers um like ben edgington talk about you know it's here it's coming in august we're ready um and to hear preston from prism saying you know it's it's happening we're here um yeah justin kind of being like yeah that'll work yeah justin is notorious optimist i'm the same like i can't help it but uh yeah i mean you know caveat if

everything goes well i mean we we really have to have every step between now and deployment go you know very smoothly you know 98 well before it's uh um yeah we we can be really confident but uh so far um everything is going to plan so you know this difficulty bomb thing i mean my last edition i had a little rant about it i it's um i it would be rather strange to postpone it if we if we uh can avoid doing so we should just get this merge done before before that thing becomes a problem obviously if there's no risk involved or minimal risk and that's that's really it's this is all about mitigating risk now

uh what is justin's tweet oh this is a great uh graph he he also shared this um in fact i was like justin that's great who did that he's like that was me yes it's awesome um the most important thing about this graph is to see at the end where lighthouse usage is going up and prison music's just going down um and do you have any thoughts on that any insight yeah it's terrific i mean i think coin base is credited with swapping a a bunch of uh validators from lighthouse to prism uh they've also boarded a lot of tekku validators um separately but i think they actually switched over a bunch there is a there's a dip earlier

on which corresponds to uh growth in nimbus adoption i don't know what that is there is an issue michael sprouse kind of analysis often um mixes up nimbus and teku so it though that's yeah may or may not be real um i like i hope it's real because you know i want to see nimbus doing well and a flat distribution across the clients but i i'm not confident about about those numbers but uh yeah this how do you feel about tech's portion is it fair do you feel like it's under-represented yeah it goes up and down a bit um so it's around 18 ish i don't know what it is today uh that's i am very happy with i'd be super happy with somewhere

between 20 and 25 um that would be you know a real sweet spot for me yeah today's a bit of a down day i i think a bunch of tecu's being credited to nimbus if you look at rated.network you can see um that you know so operators that i i know if you click on lido for example click on the lido label on the left that gives you the breakdown so i know for example that all nodes uh is 100 degree but here it shows that they're 88.5 and the rest of nimbus um you know my eyes are oh i didn't find elements oh okay interesting

yeah and they're a bunch like that which you know i'm pretty sure that they're not they're they're they're running all tekku or you know teku and and another that really explains this wild bump um makes good sense but yeah yeah so i i don't know the exact michael's been uh fiddling around with the um the the blood print and hopefully you can find a um a classifier that's uh uh accurate enough but um yeah i mean in terms of the prism i think it's pretty accurate and it's uh it's incredible i mean to go from danger you know severe uh existential threat to the network level down to sort of under 50 percent in in

three four months is is an incredible response from the the community and in particular the big staking operations it it's funny that we were hesitant to deal with this data at first like maybe maybe we shouldn't even uh know what the distribution is and i i'm really glad that michael came through and he's like you know this is this is valuable data because we would still be we would be a a prism monolithic network right now if um if if we weren't aware of of the situation so i'm really happy that it worked out yeah it is absolutely brilliant i mean having this this is the kind of hubble telescope of the uh of the validator network world i mean we were sort of practically blind i mean

just guessing numbers um prior to having this and so data's not perfect but it is so much is way much better than we than we had before yes yes and we've talked about michael sproul his we know that he is he's changing so show the show the graph uh that one i love this yes this is can you blow that up yeah there we go this this is just great so you can see taku's gray and uh lighthouses are the redder and prisms are pinker and then you can see uh nimbus is a sort of purpley color and you can see these the these are how he distinguishes between the

clients based on the way they order attestations within blocks and the kind of attestations they include um it's just genius yeah very impressed and and not you know he had the initial idea and he continues to refine it and make it even more like more accurate over time so that's great um we ought to talk about uh this next battle uh this is not i actually prefer uh this is a better view for me uh execution client diversity um it's something that [Music] i have really gone back and forth like if if if i'm part of the push to change these things and really you'd think that

the execution operators on their own would be like yeah we ought to do this but i've really been debating whether this is the right time to push execution clients or whether it's time to push uh entity size and i've really been on entity size lately um but yeah we'll get there right yeah um yeah i i don't always say to that really i mean i think um see how it looks after the merge i mean this this is a step change in the population that's going to run execution clients so you know i'm a prime example i mean i i used to run an eth1 mode like three four years ago um it got the it got too much hassle for

the value that i was getting from it um i ran parity for a while and and it was fine but you know it was just hastily changing clients and whatever um so i haven't run one for a while now i need to run one um so there's a new population as a whole you know hundreds to thousands of people like me out there who've got to make this choice um and you know let's make a good choice let's make a let's not choose a default and i realize uh this this is not based on proposals this is based on node count is that correct right right exactly and that's notoriously uh inaccurate i mean you won't know how many validators are hanging off though

so yeah um it's similar to the mega labs figures it's it's generated by a network crawler that tries to connect as many nodes as possible and identify them but you don't know how many validators those nodes are hosting and you know teku is disproportionately used by large staking operations so each tecu node hosts more validators on average than say a prism node which is uh used much more by you know home stakers um i kind of had an idea as we were talking about this um that being something like nicenode which is in the quadratic funds matching round um nice node allows you to spin up an execution client with essentially one click in your browser

if if they integrated that into meta mask so that instead of relying on meta metamask as the back end your single click nice node installer linked to metamask so people could be truly sovereign like not relying on infira for that data point then i feel like that would bring more more execution clients online bring more diversity but it really doesn't impact the the va what the validators you're using which at the end of the day is the most valuable thing but just yep yep yep uh yeah i'm gonna talk about that some other time uh let's see staking client diversity yeah i love the way you broad broaden

this discussion out it's the right time and diversity is about far more than what your software you use to run your validator client there's this whole multi-dimensional space of of diversity we need to care about and uh i thought your your talk at toronto edm was was brilliant a really nice introduction to all or overview of different aspects i'll be honest i forgot about it um and just watched it when i saw your link and i'm like ah i i like that i like i so some of that i know i understand differently now but uh the the overview is really great like i i'm i'm happy to i began this focusing on diversity and you're right now i see a

much bigger picture and i'm glad that we're moving in that direction so um yeah was that a uh was that a recent talk was that a while ago it's in march i believe oh right right right i i sorry i didn't tweak that i i assumed it was uh a recent a couple things but uh yeah it was march 9th but it hasn't been no one has seen it uh so it's and the the data is still valuable uh so i'm i'm happy with it it is probably something if i get asked to do another talk that i will uh polish and and improve and reuse but yeah i mean meanwhile this is uh you know 30 minutes of your life well spent watches if you if you want to uh you know you've got 30 minutes spare 20 minutes on 1.5 x that's 15 minutes on 2x

you know that you know rather don't don't watch it stop watching this go and watch that that's that's good stuff um we got to talk about lido for a minute and again you know what let's not talk about lido let's talk about uh entity diversity because in the same way when we were talking about client diversity and we had a majority client it was not appropriate to focus on prism at that time and it in the same way i don't believe it's appropriate to focus this discussion on lido lido is is the operator now i'm the entity now who is controlling uh nearly a third of the network but this is really about the long-term health of the beacon chain

um so i'll shut up and let you chat for a minute yeah this has been brewing for a little while we we discussed it um last time uh i this is really interesting to unfold i mean i i have conflicted sort of views you know it hasn't crystallized for me as a very black and white issue in that there there is another point of view which lido is is putting which is they are a relatively thin coordination layer they're not uh sort of um in control of these validators in any meaningful way um which i have some sympathy for so they've got like 20 plus operators who are nominally independent but lido are

kind of gatekeepers right they say who can and who can't be uh participate in the liquid staking protocol and and so on so it's sort of i'm still sorting out exactly what i think about this it is a spectrum it's not completely black and white like all centralization topics you know it's better and worse it's not good and bad necessarily it's you know it's somewhere on a spectrum so having said that i i i think it's good to have be having these conversations you know early in the life of the the beacon chain and uh you know the um ethereum proof of stake system and setting some norms and expectations and yeah i mean the the the

the big hitters have uh have come in and uh very interesting to see how how this came together with sort of i think you kicked it off with your 22 sort of target uh for you know community to start putting pressure on uh entities um and then um danny uh came in with his it's an attack on the protocol at 33 which is um that's direct yeah yeah yeah and so as we know danny he is uh he is a very non-conflict-oriented guy and for him to make this kind of statement on on

twitter i find very uh very compelling and it's not just that i mean he's very conscious of his position in all of this he is potentially the most kind of influential voice on the staking side you know being long-time coordinator of of the the whole beacon chain delivery and he he has a very powerful voice uh in this and so choosing to use it is um is striking i i was surprised yeah um and then from yeah vitalik coming in sort of uh yeah so uh ramping up so 15 i don't know where he gets this number

from but uh you know it's a finger in the air but um we should set aside kind of social norm but if if any entity gets more than 15 they should uh he suggests start raising fees to sort of reduce the the the inflows which is not not a bad idea um yeah and that kind of culminated in this this staggered approach uh where uh you know metallic suggestion that pools began throttling at 15 at 22 the community says whoa we are the community we're we're a layer of defense for the chain what you're doing is is not safe please stop we're going to stop patronizing you we want

you to get right um and then at 33 it's regarded as an attack which i think we should take seriously um and not not just kind of roll over and say it's okay uh you know we're not passionate enough to make change we're just gonna hope something works out in the long run i think i don't know yeah yeah and i think um yeah decentralization is the the centralizing forces are everywhere right and there are different ways of tackling them we've done a few things in protocol it's really hard to do everything in protocol but ultimately it's layer zero is you and me and the

all of the rest of people staking and participating in ecosystem who who set the norms and expectations and ultimately it is in our hands to whether ethereum ends up centralized or decentralized so anyway i i know uh we we know we know elido has agreed to hold a governance discussion i have stayed out of that uh i don't believe so i'm i'm a member of a lot of communities but i've never i've never engaged with the lido community and so i don't feel like it's appropriate for me to come in and say you know here i am this is what i think when it really is their uh their internal discussion and i think when we get results of that when we get

the outcome of that it'll be time to re-evaluate our position yeah fair enough um i mean in as much as we're all participants whether specifically in lido but in the network i think uh we all have a voice in that you know whether we're sort of lido token holders or not um i i think we all have a voice so i wouldn't be too shy about getting involved um but uh yeah it's it is what it is i uh i look forward i i haven't really engaged myself um it's fair to say yeah hey you know well we don't have to talk about at length i feel like it is their opportunity to have

a lido based discussion um and because you know there's a lot of opportunity for community input but for the stakeholders to say this is how we see the protocol and what we want to do i think it's valuable to give them that opportunity okay so that is again i i'm really interested in in the future not you but as a community as we address this that we address this as as a decentralization event as a as an entity size debate never as a lido is too big debate because that's that's not really where i want to be or where i think we should be because this is the first example of something that's going to occur again in the future

yeah for sure uh let's oh so a metrics exporter so this is a grafana kind of thing um is that right like yeah uh this is um it makes swapping clients easier just because you got one less thing to worry about so all of the clients export their own sort of sets of metrics and are all slightly differently named and it's just an another annoyance you just have to make a new dashboard if you if you swap client um and this brings everything together there was an effort to put a sort of minimal set of metrics unify the naming across clients and unify their production and we got a few done but

i think this is much broader just translates everything to a common um pattern it's the standard api effort is that still happening yeah that's uh that's got a lot of traction and everyone's very mindful of it so when we make um changes to the clients we feedback um uh pl's upstream to that and just you know make sure it's all consistent and yeah that's been a huge success actually that's a great initiative mikhail explains the merge i didn't watch this but this is some guys i recognize okay hello and welcome yeah dude um good talk from a car um and yeah going over all the regular merge

basics i mean just uh covers all the bases uh this is definitely something that um even for people who understand it it's a great way to to kind of you know when you get something and then you watch someone else explain it you it kind of fills in those little bitty grooves that you missed so i do look forward to checking that out data availability and rollups yeah this has been a a great little series by uh bartek i don't know bartek but um he's written uh just a bunch of tweet threads on the proto-dank sharding thing eip484

and this one is about how we're going to use it yeah what's it good for yeah that was essentially over my head i forced myself to be okay saying that but ah weak subjectivity checkpoints failing i found that really interesting because it i i really want to hear your thoughts on it um yeah uh so it's not not a simple topic see so proof of staking introduces a thing called weak subjectivity which doesn't exist in proof of work so and it's a camp yeah it's a bit of an achilles heel right so the point is if you want to sync up a new validator or you haven't connected your validator

to the network for quite a long time several weeks then um you can't know that somebody hasn't done a long range attack so you if somebody can acquire a big chunk of the stake maybe exited validators can sell their keys like the um attacker can go back in time effectively and build a new chain basically for free because you know there's no work to do they can just simulate the proof of stake protocol and they and they can anchor that um chain somewhere in the past so if you're stinking from genesis you you might get onto the attackers chain or you might get onto the right chain you don't know they uh

there's a period of time that you know is okay because the we rate limit how um how many validators can exit the protocol at any any time so if less than half the validated i mean how i'm hand waving here but if less than half the validators have exited then there can't be a long range attack so basically the weak subjectivity period is like you know the time it takes for half or two thousand validators to exit the protocol which is several weeks so that that's um so if you are at a moment nobody can exit the protocol so effectively the week subjectivity period goes back 18 months to genesis currently but when people can exit then then it becomes more of a um a live issue

so how can you find out you're on the right chain well one the original concept was that there are checkpoints which is block hashes which are distributed around the place you i can you know ask my friends i can look on twitter i can check with the block explorers or you know infuria or whatever and just say what what's you know people i more or less trust and i can correlate them and get a bunch of data points you know what what's the hash of blog 10 million and i can just check if i get the right hash that's great if i don't then i know i need to resync and get somehow onto the right chain you know find different peers um and so that was the original concept of it but there are all sorts of problems with that and adrian kind of

lays it out and he does it in his sort of direct australian way uh in in this article and basically it's a puff piece for um teku's um checkpoint sync which um effectively the same thing you're you're getting a state from the network which is recent which is with within the last week subjectivity period last two or three weeks and you're sinking from that you're not going back to genesis and following the chain and checking you've got the right checkpoint you're just taking that checkpoint state and thinking from that and adrian's argument is that that is no worse than probably in fact better than messing around with checkpoint um just to checkpoint hashes

okay that and that is kind of as an end user what i take away from this is that uh using checkpoint sync is a much more reliable way uh to connect to the the correct head than sinking from genesis even though we have this this long-standing idea that there's nothing better than seeking from genesis that's really a misunderstanding at this point is that right yeah that that's imported from proof of work and is actually dangerous under proof of stake to do that um you need to sample the network um and uh check to check that you've ended up on the right chain and yeah and you'll know pretty quickly if you if you're not on the right chain because you know my node and

your mode will diverge and you know only one of us can be right thanks this is i like you call yourself some old dude because yeah it's um another great talk um uh yeah this is just a thing we uh recorded that uh this is a bit of fun uh we recorded at amsterdam so uh i'm looking this is another one i i'm like i should really watch that yeah um we got our uh consensus pr people got a production company in amsterdam involved and it was all a big set up with you know lots of cameras and microphones and everything is good all good fun and uh it was nicely scripted and um yeah it

was fun so and hopefully informative do you subscribe to the ultrasound money meme that wasn't my main focus there i'm i'm coming around to it i'm coming through i mean it's neat uh but you know i do hear a lot of people say that that you know the demand is exaggerated but it's i love that justin is so persistent with them that is you know it's so ubiquitous yeah i let him uh justin basically covered that stuff and i i covered some more technical stuff about about merge things yeah cool cool uh let's see dank sharding this talk yeah uh yeah it's great um fairly technical i mean it's um

yeah good stuff again i love that um you know bankless reaches such a wide audience from you know it originally it started as like an introduction to um you know cryptocurrency and not needing banks and now you know they're having proto and vitalik you know um talking about really complex concepts so and don't crowd so yeah yeah 20 000 people watch that and it does get into some pretty hairy detail at times my fa my favorite bangla story is that uh on my phone they're um their screen when my when it was playing on my um podcast player missed off the first and last letters

and so it just said ankles my viceroy is like what are you listening to everybody's got a thing and the very next week i got air dropped some ether socks and so you know the foot related theme continued but there we go i have to explain that to them well now that it's public you're probably gonna end up with more socks please everyone send ben your unisocks oliver unisocks will be great so how to discuss the merge with danny wow there's so much good stuff i i've missed a bunch of this

yeah uh this is great this is part one howto is uh his great interviewer i mean he keeps out of the way but asks good penetrating questions clearly understands clearly you know the the material and uh yeah yeah it's great this this was really good i when i clicked on this i expected to see his image here and then i was like oh he's he's a nun so so it's funny i found like three things that i'm you know i've got i've got to listen to now that i'm really excited about yeah i'm sorry welcome no it's great stuff yeah um what do we think about cloudfair cloudflare yeah i'm i'm generally positive to cloudflare and um pudding uh they are literally going to

stake i mean they are putting um uh money down you know um skin in the game uh on this they're being crypto affirmative for quite a while now some of their crypto libraries are very useful um and you know that's sorry cryptocurrency crypto cryptography yeah well you looking at things like ipfs their implementation of ipfs has been beneficial to everyone like they they have made ipfs uh so available that it kind of has taken it to a new level yeah so interested to see where it goes just kind of noting it for now they've just announced this this thing so uh

yeah bullish cloudflare yeah i'm really optimistic about it myself and i because we know industry is going to come in to ethereum staking and i think it's important for us as the community to welcome them but to also kind of like hold them to our standards rather than letting them run roughshod and do what they want and so um i'm excited about cloudfare cloudflare i can't say cloudflare it is surprisingly hard to say out fair uh but you know i i look forward to them someone said you know well they're they're going to instantly um load a bunch of validators and and take over the network and i think that's an unrealistic

perception like yeah seems unlikely they will have billions of dollars of eth on their balance sheet yes um we'll see but yeah very excited to have them very very excited to have enterprise providers especially uh ones that have a great reputation for um positive engagement so that's cool network ethereum foundation requests for proposals network data availability sampling sampling yeah so i think one of our challenges over the years is that whilst we have very competent networking people around in the client teams and so forth

there's a sort of a specialist or depth of expertise which which has been lacking um over the years we've had very few specialist um peer-to-peer network uh people you know engage at a deep level with with the protocol uh and with the with the data availability sampling we're taking the network demands to the next level so it works today it hangs together and you know people have come together and built a protocol that works but we're going to the next level um and um there's a desire to get some you know proper specialist help in hence this rfp um so yeah

listeners if you know anyone who is deep into peer-to-peer networking and not necessarily engaged with crypto send this their way i feel like uh at this point people who are familiar with peer-to-peer are also crypto natives by now is that that's not fair i don't know the space well enough but yeah yeah it's a great opportunity for yeah someone to hop in and become a participant with ethereum what is this yeah this has appeared sort of low level for the last few issues so guillen ballet is um doing his thing just building this

vertical um this version of geth and i think nethermind is also compatible which uses vertical trees instead of the patricia merkel tree which has been used since ethereum started and basically it's the the model for how we go stateless with ethereum so we get rid of our you know terabyte of uh disk that it uses and whatever and we just uh have stateless transactions so guillaume's been you know plugging away at this he's built this test net it's actually open and people can join and um let's get get stuck in so um there are no concrete plans to deploy this uh in the in the very near future it is

still firmly under r d but uh look looks good and it looks promising sounds great i look forward to checking that out yeah statelessness is one of those you know things that it's not critical to the future of ethereum but it really will help you know a huge amount if we achieve it yeah i feel like it's critical to decentralization because um home users cannot be expected to continue adding storage space well into the future like we need to have nodes that normal people can go to you know literally the the you know electronics store and buy something that they can run a note on yeah yeah and it's not just storage i

mean the bigger the state gets the slower it is to access and so yeah statelessness helps a bunch of things and you can parallelize transactions because you know which bits of state they touch and stuff it's very cool yeah yep uh so consensus implementers call love your notes as always yeah christine is uh killing it as well my former podcast uh collaborator she's just brilliant that she's still fully engaged in ethereum space and uh she's doing a terrific job of um uh writing up much more detailed notes than i do so it's great uh and a couple things to look forward to uh june 3rd is

merge community call number four which i want to make sure that i get to um oh yeah thanks a reminder as well hey something about june 8th it's kind of a big deal right yeah we'll all be around for robston for the merge danny's notes are great but i it's funny because i think we've covered pretty much everything in those notes here and finally the 100th edition of what's new in eth2 yeah i'm kind of starting to think about the future you know i've been writing this thing for three and a half years now yeah more than um and you know what do i do just starting to think about what it what the future looks like and i thought

100th edition coming up due 26th of august if i keep up the fortnightly cadence um which hopefully is post merge yeah how do you feel about it are you do you feel strong or do you feel like you're ready for a break i don't want to preempt too much um i yeah i i vacillate on this i mean it is it's a lot of work and you know it's stopping me doing other things like i'm making like making progress on the book and things um but on the other hand it it helps it forces me to be aware of everything going on which sort of helps so but yeah people are people are still reading it readership keeps going up so um do you have that thing where you ask

yourself like where are my most valuable is that do you have that yeah i try i try to um though the answers are hard to find sometimes to these questions so i i don't really know i i put it to joe lubin that i might sort of call it a day after the merge and he was like but we've got so much more coming you know charlie and there's statelessness everything he's this is just he was a bit horrified at the idea that it might go away so uh we'll see or i might do something completely different you know look actually get some validation in terms of sponsor um i've never it's never been sponsored never had uh advertising um

you know maybe that would be the motivation i need if people were prepared to sponsor the uh the thing um or something like that you're really you should get sponsored like that that i i know you know money is not our motivator but it is a good signal like yeah exactly yeah anyway um i i would totally encourage that um but it is what it is uh well ben i think we've done it again yeah but it's it's great i'm gonna go ahead and stop this recording so ben and i try to do this every two weeks um we have a little bit of uh fluctuation but

uh we think it's i think it's really valuable to talk to talk through this newsletter with ben and really just get this information out it's so valuable thanks for your time appreciate the time for it's really good to speak to you as ever and great to cover some of these topics