1/ Why I won't be staking ETH at launch, a thread...

#Ethereum #eth2

Like many of you, I am excited for ETH2, the Beacon Chain, Phase 0, and everything that will come after.

I have participated in Onyx, Witti, Altona, and Medalla test networks.

I tried Prysm and Lighthouse.

2/ I ran the clients in docker on Windows, docker in Linux, and bare metal on Linux.

I've opened github issues against both clients multiple times. I even participated in the fuzz testing.

3/ I've pretty much done it all when it comes to getting familiar with the clients, how to run them, how to configure them, etc.

However, I will not be participating in the genesis, and I will not be staking ETH. Why?

Well, a few reasons really.

4/ First we have the fact that the average Medalla validator is still in the red.

We all know that everyone is in the red due to a bug in a single client, and the bug was fix...yay?

What happens when/if a similar bug happens on mainnet? What's the response?

5/ Because the Medalla response to do fuck all is an unacceptable response. None of the teams have demonstrated their ability to "fix" a situation like this. To this date there hasn't been a single successful fork of an ETH2 beacon chain.

6/ This is something that the ETH2 teams seem to be proud of as well. Their response to questions like this is "Let's get it out the door and worry about forks later." Excuse me?

7/ No. You want to come into a production network with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars day one with pristine, audited code, only to figure out how to deal with forks later? No thanks. The DAO Part 2 will happen, it's not a matter of if but when.

8/ When Vitalik's answer to what do we do when ETH2 is attacked is "fork" but nobody wants to demonstrate what a fork for ETH2 looks like...yikes...

9/ Now, speaking of the issue being caused by a single client...that brings me to my second issue, you would think that prior to going to mainnet the teams would all just agree on unified APIs that would allow a validator node from one client to talk to a beacon node from…

10/ …another client...but no, that seems to be something to finalize / work out later too. The whole thing wreaks of being in a hurry to deliver on an arbitrary deadline that nobody is enforcing but themselves.

11/ Without a doubt there is a disconnect between the quality, funding, and cooperation between the ETH2 client teams. It's one thing to say "You should run a non-Prysm node" and it's another thing to actually put your $ down on doing so.

12/ Third issue: All of the testnets to date have been HEAVILY centralized and don't at all resemble what mainnet will/should look like. What do I mean by this? Simple. Goerli ETH is easy to get and people are running hundreds or thousands of validators at a time.

13/ Who the fuck as 32,000 ETH sitting around waiting for ETH2 to launch? Nobody. That's who. The ETH2 testnets to date have a few beacon nodes and then thousands of validators hanging off those beacon nodes.

14/ Unless we're all happy with staking pools controlling everything like mining pools do today, this is a piss poor test of network conditions. You guys know how everyone makes fun of ETH killers and their centralized IOPS because they only have a handful of nodes?

15/ That's what ETH2 test networks look like today.

16/ 1,000 beacon nodes running 64 validators looks a lot different than 64,000 beacon nodes running 1 validator when it comes to network behavior, propagation, delay, etc.

Finally we have the fourth and final reason: Inactivity Leak, Incorrectly Voting, and ? Rewards?

17/ If I put enough effort into it, and I use good stable hardware, solid monitoring tools (that really don't exist), have a stable internet, don't have power outages, etc. then sure Inactivity Leak won't be a problem. But...good luck with all that...

18/ You might not know this but even if your node is online and behaving correctly, it can still vote wrong. Yes, that's right, your validators don't always vote correctly.

The question really becomes, how rewarding is staking?

19/ How much rewards for staking makes staking worth it for me, as a normal computer nerd who loves Ethereum to participate? I mean, I can invest in a lot of stuff these days...DeFi is blowing up. Why stake as an individual? When Phase 2?

20/ The bridge is one-way, I'm going to lock my ETH and lose all opportunity costs...is it worth it? I'm not convinced it is. The rewards for staking are variable, maybe, I just don't know.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.