# Ethereum 2.0 Venture



## m3s

Ethereum is an evolving open source platform for decentralized applications.

It enables advanced programmable digital currencies, but can also compute any application from anywhere. This makes it a novel platform for anything from decentralized financial services to games. You could think of it as a global computer that provides decentralized processing and smart contracts. The practical applications are endless but its blockchain attributes and ability to make smart contracts without an intermediary make it particularly interesting for disruptive financial technology

The more nodes the more robust and responsive the network is therefore an incentive is required to maintain enough nodes. The rewards could be from 20% to 5% depending on the daily transaction value and % of ether that is staked (supply and demand). Here is a very detailed eth2 calculator where you can see probabilistic simulated economics and rewards. I am hoping for 10% as a form of bonus cypto income while I am mostly long ETH (hodling it anyways)

I currently have an old laptop running a validator node in linux on the test nets. I chose the laptop because it will continue running uninterrupted over long power outages. Next I plan to add a UPS for my router and modem for uninterrupted high speed internet (might also add starlink..) Laptops were not designed to run 24/7 for years though so I might consider getting a linux server that is better designed to do this. The server would also be able to run multiple validators

Each validator requires 32 ETH to be staked until phase 2 (timeline uncertain maybe 2 years)


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## m3s

Step 1 - Beacon chain sync

Installed ubuntu on a 2011 Macbook Pro 2.8GHz 16GB memory and spare 256GB SSD (removed my macOS SSD)
You can use macOS 10.14 but this laptop was only supported up to 10.13 (although Apple was still updating the older versions)
Linux is far better for this anyways because it has live updates and doesn't put the SSD to sleep etc

Connected to 29-31 peers (30 is the default limit)
The CPU threads seem to be cycling at 100% each. Not sure if this will lighten up with time or how long an old laptop could handle that abuse
Memory is stable at 3GB so far

The developers are very active and responsive on discord. They are refining the documents and instructions based on discord questions

So far it's been pretty smooth


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## bgc_fan

Any thoughts about using a raspberry pi for this sort of thing? Processing power isn't as powerful, but decreased electrical requirements.


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## m3s

On paper the raspberry pi 8GB with usb storage should be able to handle it. That's like $150USD? In a power outage the raspberry pi, router and modem would run well on a UPS

I already had this laptop and SSD so just seeing how the testing goes and what others say about other setups. I doubt it's good to run a laptop 24/7 but I wasn't using it much anymore anyways


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## bgc_fan

Something like that. Canakit has it for $104 CDN for the bare board. Additional addons bring it up to $194. Raspberry Pi 4 8GB

I have a spare pi3 and thought I could play with that, but it only has 1 GB ram.


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## m3s

I haven't used a pi

If you had an external USB SSD you could maybe partition a slice for ram. I believe you also need a 64 bit Linux



> Minimum requirements
> 
> Operating System: 64-bit Linux, Mac OS X 10.14+, Windows
> Processor: Intel Core i5–760 or AMD FX-8100 or better
> Memory: 4GB RAM
> Storage: 20GB available space SSD
> Internet: Broadband connection


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## bgc_fan

m3s said:


> I haven't used a pi
> 
> If you had an external USB SSD you could maybe partition a slice for ram. I believe you also need a 64 bit Linux


I may look at it for a fun little project. I do have a spare SSD with enclosure, so not much needed to try it.


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## james4beach

ETH is very cool and I always liked the programmable aspect of the crypto currency.

My issue is that I have trouble getting motivated enough to invest time & energy into this one (ETH) or that one (BTC). There are so many crypto currencies in existence and new ones keep popping up all the time. Why would _this_ one, or that one, still be around in say 5 years? Can it compete with all the newer inventions?

And is it worth investing the time/energy/capital when there is no assurance that ETH or BTC will still be a thing in ~ 5 or 10 years?


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## m3s

I thought the same way but the more I look into it the more interesting ethereum gets. The light bulb for me was realizing ethereum is the platform that most of the major crypto currencies run on (apparently ethereum serves as a platform for over 260,000 other randoms) 

That isn't to say it doesn't run its course and get overtaken with something better. Some of the alts come up with good ideas like proof of stake.. which ethereum is now improving on.. so it has to be something ethereum can't just adopt itself. Most of the alts are just scams, niche use or memes. The internet is very old now as a network but we don't replace it because everyone uses it already. I feel like ethereum is gaining that sort of momentum and has the adaptability

BTC is irrelevant imo. I don't see any advantage besides name recognition for people who just want crypto without knowing any different. It isn't being developed or improved. Its allure is its store of value and that many BTCs were already lost or destroyed. It's very slow and dumb by comparison


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## james4beach

m3s said:


> BTC is irrelevant imo. I don't see any advantage besides name recognition for people who just want crypto without knowing any different. It isn't being developed or improved. Its allure is its store of value and that many BTCs were already lost or destroyed. It's very slow and dumb by comparison


True, but that demonstrates just how fleeting "crypto currencies" are.

Imagine the people who became convinced by the Bitcoin story and started building massive holdings while it was popular. For a while, BTC was _the_ crypto currency.

What good is an asset which becomes irrelevant within 3 years? The reason people like stocks and gold is that they have been viable asset classes for centuries (millennia in the case of gold).

My worry about jumping on the ETH bandwagon is that, given the track record of these things, it could become irrelevant in a handful of years. That's a big problem if the goal is to accumulate the asset as part of your long term investments and net worth.

In contrast, I have _not_ experienced that problem with stocks, bonds, GICs, and gold.


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## m3s

Well I'm not here to sell anyone anything. I was never sold on BTC myself.

I like how ethereum has kind of taken ideas from BTC and others to improve on the concepts and become something much more than an asset class. It is a blockchain platform. This is also a very small % side venture of my portfolio. It just happens to be the more exciting one right now.

In the central banker world however it feels like all the doomsday stars are starting to align


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## nathan79

I have a Raspberry Pi, so I might play around with this.

Bitcoin development is ongoing behind the scenes. Here's some of the potential upgrades coming down the pipe: Bitcoin’s Potential 2020 Protocol Upgrades - Bitcoin Magazine

I see no problem with buying ETH, but one should be aware that it's a more speculative play. BTC is far safer, relatively speaking. This is reflected in the development, with BTC's devs being far more conservative. That's been a winning strategy so far.

Regardless of what happens with ETH, it's unlikely to replace Bitcoin in any sense. They are two completely different concepts with different goals.


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## :) lonewolf

james4beach said:


> And is it worth investing the time/energy/capital when there is no assurance that ETH or BTC will still be a thing in ~ 5 or 10 years?


 Price is all that matters. Who cares what your trading? When the price pattern puts the odds strongly in your favor.


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## m3s

nathan79 said:


> I have a Raspberry Pi, so I might play around with this.


If interested here's a link to the instructions for the Onyx testnet. However don't jump in now because that net is about to shutdown and new documents will be up soon for the next testnet

I agree ethereum doesn't replace BTC just like the federal reserve didn't replace gold. I think people see them all as BTC which isn't the case. BTC is more like a store of value. Ethereum is very much in active development but I'm getting more interested as theories are getting tested now

It's interesting to see the testing of something this scale going smoothly when it's just random people online. Military/business structure could learn some things from this kind of hive collaboration


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## :) lonewolf

The fed is destroying the money world. Their goal is to own everything to control us. One world digital fiat currency.


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## m3s

CPU load looks better once the beacon chain is synced

Got 165 test ETH ready in a crypto wallet (no real value)

Waiting for the new Launch Pad for Medalla testnet to go live tomorrow


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## MrMatt

james4beach said:


> What good is an asset which becomes irrelevant within 3 years? The reason people like stocks and gold is that they have been viable asset classes for centuries (millennia in the case of gold).
> 
> My worry about jumping on the ETH bandwagon is that, given the track record of these things, it could become irrelevant in a handful of years. That's a big problem if the goal is to accumulate the asset as part of your long term investments and net worth.
> 
> In contrast, I have _not_ experienced that problem with stocks, bonds, GICs, and gold.


Gold is useful.
ETH is useful, so it might have value as long as those uses remain.


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## m3s

My brain sees infinite vague possibilities that I have trouble understanding when people ask what is the use. When computers and smartphones came out people always said what use when I have paper, flip phone etc

Some examples are universities like MIT are now validating degrees with crypto tokens. The use is in everything we currently validate with some ink scribbles on paper or vulnerable computer files online and probably far more than we know

Ethereum happens to be much more versatile and responsive for real world applications. For example in the days of social distancing you can use a Proof of Attendance Protocol instead of using spreadsheets for everything


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## MrMatt

m3s said:


> My brain sees infinite vague possibilities that I have trouble understanding when people ask what is the use. When computers and smartphones came out people always said what use when I have paper, flip phone etc
> 
> Some examples are universities like MIT are now validating degrees with crypto tokens. The use is in everything we currently validate with some ink scribbles on paper or vulnerable computer files online and probably far more than we know
> 
> Ethereum happens to be much more versatile and responsive for real world applications. For example in the days of social distancing you can use a Proof of Attendance Protocol instead of using spreadsheets for everything


I think the problem with a lot of the non-currency type blockchain applications is the lack of interface to the real world.
I don't get the MIT degree validation or Proof of Attendance.
To be fair I didn't look into it, but it seems that
MIT Degree validation is just that some Crypto authority claiming to be MIT said it's a valid degree, but that's really not conceptually different than a website doing the same thing.
It doesn't even need to be blockchain related, looking at the webpage it just looks like a public key application.

For Proof of attendance, it doesn't prove that person interfaced, just a key interacted with the other keys and blockchain at that time.


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## m3s

There is no crypto authority. Anyone can verify transactions themselves. That is a core point

It's the exact same discussions I had about computers and smartphones. People would say who cares about some random web pages or apps and come up with all kinds of reasons they feel uncomfortable with change

For something like proof of attendance I think the difference is how the data is recorded rather than issued. Blockchain transactions can't be tampered like a central file on a computer can. You can't retroactively get that token or edit them after the fact.

This is huge for things like supply chain management. Sure there are always ways to mess with the system but let's be honest we are currently working with 19th century records that everyone knows is extremely easy to forge and tamper with

We can't really say exactly how they will be used but we can see there is massive potential.


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## MrMatt

m3s said:


> There is no crypto authority. Anyone can verify transactions themselves. That is a core point
> 
> It's the exact same discussions I had about computers and smartphones. People would say who cares about some random web pages or apps and come up with all kinds of reasons they feel uncomfortable with change
> 
> For something like proof of attendance I think the difference is how the data is recorded rather than issued. Blockchain transactions can't be tampered like a central file on a computer can. You can't retroactively get that token or edit them after the fact.
> 
> This is huge for things like supply chain management. Sure there are always ways to mess with the system but let's be honest we are currently working with 19th century records that everyone knows is extremely easy to forge and tamper with
> 
> We can't really say exactly how they will be used but we can see there is massive potential.


You're missing my point.
You still have to trust that the authority who put it on the blockchain is who you think it is.

I could go put it on the Blockchain that I have an MIT degree, then all I have to do is put that key on the MIT website.
You can make a write only log file, you don't need a public blockchain for that.

I agree there is potential there, but there are a lot of holes to be filled.


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## m3s

That doesn't introduce any new issue that doesn't already exist. You could forge your own paper degree and make some random ink scribbles

If you make your own blockchain certification the time can not be forged. You also cannot edit blockchain transactions the way you can hack the MIT central database

I'm not a crypto expert but it seems to improve validity without down side/expense. I imagine MIT researched this far more than I


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## m3s

The final Ethereum 2.0 testnet is up and there is now a launchpad walk-through to generate keys and deposit 32 test ETH

If you want some test crypto in a crypto wallet you can open a metamask account. If you post the address here I can send you test ETH (no value)

The Medalla testnet will activate on Tuesday. Within the first 24hrs there's already +18,000 validator accounts according to the Medalla beaconscan


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## R. Austin

I hold some ETH (leftover from the great bubble a few years back) but have limited knowledge about it, any explanation or thoughts as to why the recent uptick in July? Increased uses, public adoption, store of value given the US's declining situation?


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## m3s

All of that and more.

There has been a lot of institutional interest. When I see +18,000 test nodes before the net has been activated while there are mere dozens active in chat with developers out of hundreds following.. I can only assume there are institutions involved

A lot of ETH will be locked up during phase 0-2 of ETH2 launch. How much ETH gets staked, how phase 0-2 goes and what the market does will all create uncertainty next few years. Hopefully things keep going this smoothly and the price continues a steady climb

It's a gamble for sure


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## m3s

ETH2 final testnet will go live Tues morning

ETH rallied 75% in 2 weeks, 250% since march, 2 year high
BTC is up 20%, 120% same time. Some say because of ETH

Phase 0 and 1 of ETH2 should do well for the price as staked ETH will be locked up until phase 2


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## m3s

Final testnet went live this morning. My validator and beacon chain synced up on their own while I was at work. I am now earning fake ETH

Relieved to see the CPU idling much better at 10-15% now. If it stays like this the old 2011 MacBook just might do. While syncing the beacon chain the CPUs were hitting 100% and the fan was constantly on. Sounds like 256GB SSD however may not be enough for the mainnet. If so I will need to swap the ubuntu and MacOS SSD around for 500GB

If I have to claim this as income I suppose I could claim a 1TB SSD expense. Should also buy a UPS to maximize up time


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## m3s

First 24 hrs

Attested 220/227
Proposed 1 block

Earned 0.0144 fake ETH (+$5USD) or +16% APR estimated

Many validators proposed 2 or 3 blocks and earned up to $10USD or +25% APR estimated. Looking to see if there's anything I can do to increase my chances of proposing more blocks but I believe this is just random luck

3 validators were slashed and the 3 validators that caught them earned +$30USD


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## sags

All I have seen so far is that corporations are adapting the blockchain and ETH to develop their own internal use.

I see no reason they would require outside verification for their internal business and I doubt they would want it exposed anyways.


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## m3s

After 1 week the balance is up about $30USD of fake ETH. Estimated ROI is about 15% APR

On the 2nd day of testing participation rate dropped. I missed a string of blocks until they pushed an update. I haven't touched the laptop since day 2 and it didn't miss another block all week. Very smooth and hands off for week one of testing so far










I just ordered a new M.2 1TB SSD for my main PC. Plan is to setup my PC as the backup. I'll test a virtual machine otherwise I'll dual boot linux as a backup

That frees up another 500GB SSD to move into the laptop so it will have 2 x 500GB SSD. Plan is to setup the laptop to update itself and SSH remotely to monitor


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## m3s

The testnet imploded Friday afternoon and hasn't recovered.

I was installing the new M.2 SSD in my PC when I heard the laptop spooling up. It had been silent all week so I check it out. I started getting errors and others started to report the same. I was able to contribute some as it's surprisingly similar troubleshooting to data networks I know

The developers are very active and engaged with the community like an open source project. They are based around the world and very professional. Many seem to have backgrounds at major tech companies you've heard of. They are backed by major banks you've heard of.

I pretty much abandoned my validator. Peers were giving bad data so it was spinning tires and bad validators get booted. I was preparing my main PC to take over as a backup node on a different client. Now I'm organizing old hard drives to free up a few old 500GB SSDs

The developers have been working all weekend. It will be interesting to see how they go forward


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## m3s

sags said:


> All I have seen so far is that corporations are adapting the blockchain and ETH to develop their own internal use.
> 
> I see no reason they would require outside verification for their internal business and I doubt they would want it exposed anyways.


@sags I believe you are looking from the wrong perspective

Why would a company use the internet? Phones? Why would they use banks? They should keep everything internal?

Should they go back to paper mail or carrier pigeons?


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## m3s

Poor CPU working hard to resync the chain but we're back in business


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## james4beach

I'm a technical guy but have no clue what any of the above means. You're talking about test networks.

Is this a new variation of Ethereum? Are you running an experiment?

Or are you currently mining coins and making money? I don't understand what's going on... maybe you can tell us more.

Is this a test you are running to evaluate the profitability of mining ETH coins? Are you going to look at things like electricity and equipment costs vs proceeds of coins you can mine/sell?


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## MrMatt

james4beach said:


> I'm a technical guy but have no clue what any of the above means. You're talking about test networks.
> 
> Is this a new variation of Ethereum? Are you running an experiment?
> 
> Or are you currently mining coins and making money? I don't understand what's going on... maybe you can tell us more.
> 
> Is this a test you are running to evaluate the profitability of mining ETH coins? Are you going to look at things like electricity and equipment costs vs proceeds of coins you can mine/sell?


The 'state of the art' in crypto isn't mining anymore. They've gone to Proof of Stake for new stuff, though some are still Proof of Work (aka mining)

it's actually a very technically complex field, you can spend a lot of time trying to figure it out.


As far as Ethereum, there are several variants, and also a split a while ago.
One thing with open source, and most of the reputable crypto currencies are, is that it tends to fragment if different people have different ideas on how things should be done.

Lets say you want to go in one direction, your partner wants to go in another.
You can agree, or you can just fork it and do your own thing.


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## m3s

james4beach said:


> I'm a technical guy but have no clue what any of the above means. You're talking about test networks.


Yes it's an interesting combination of tech and finance. This is a network being final tested with the public on multiple platforms etc. Based on IP and chat there are thousands of participants around the world



james4beach said:


> Is this a new variation of Ethereum? Are you running an experiment?


Ethereum can process about 15 transactions/second while visa does 1500. Ethereum 2 introduces a beacon chain that will allow for multiple parallel blockchains (shards) to address the transactions/second scalability limitations



james4beach said:


> Or are you currently mining coins and making money? I don't understand what's going on... maybe you can tell us more.


I'm testing ETH2 on an old MacBook to see how it actually works. If you are familiar with Linux commands it's pretty straightforward (I hadn't really touched Linux in eons and I got it working, thanks to guides but I'm relearning)

Ethereum will abandon mining next year if all goes to plan. Instead committing electricity resources to mine and process the network, you commit 32 ETH per validator and earn 15% APR (for simplicity sake) in reward for processing the network

You can run a beacon node, ethereum chain, multiple validators, slasher (earns large rewards if you catch a bad validator) etc on a Raspberry Pi. A low powered NUC with stable power/network is probably more realistic



james4beach said:


> Is this a test you are running to evaluate the profitability of mining ETH coins? Are you going to look at things like electricity and equipment costs vs proceeds of coins you can mine/sell?


I'm getting to understand the process a lot more by participating. I wanted to see how they will generate and manage the contracts/keys/rewards etc. Get an idea of how much hardware, electricity, internet, storage and how involved the process is etc

For the first week testing was very uneventful. They pushed 1 emergency update on like day 2 and then my old laptop processed quietly all week. On Friday afternoon all hell broke loose. This wasn't planned but it's made things a lot more interesting since


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## m3s

On Friday I heard the MacBook spool up while I was installing a new SSD

I see a lot of roughtime errors in the logs and others post the same in chat. The developers scrambled to come up with another emergency patch like on day 2. Unfortunately the emergency update made late on a Friday night caused even more issues and confusion.

I happened to be watching along seeing that I was one of the affected validators. I updated to the emergency patch, rolled back when they found more errors and also cleared my database to resync without errors seeing if I could troubleshoot things in real time

Turns out the timing errors cause those of us affected to start a chain in the future. When we fixed the error and got to that time in the future, we were slashed for voting on multiple blocks at the same time. My validator basically got ejected with a fine for violation

This is what tests are for and I learned a lot more about how the network functions and the teams.


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## m3s

My first validator key was deactivated yesterday and I activated 10 new validator keys to see how the computer resources compared

While my node is all sync'd up it looks like CPU usage is about 25% and memory 50%. It's substantially higher load but not 10x higher. The clients are also becoming more and more efficient with updates. I've tried a few different clients in case one crashes like last week

There is also a pooling service coming that will allow you to stake 16ETH of your own and a pool of other people's 16ETH per validator.


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## MrMatt

So what wallets & Exchanges are you using?


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## :) lonewolf

The best way to buy Ethereum or Bitcoin is through Grayscale when they have a public offering. Reason being their ETNs almost always trade @ a premium. Buy @ market value the underlying then after holding period expires sell the ETN @ a premium.

Bitcoin holding period is 6 months. Bitcoin has a strong seasonal pattern to view go to seasonax & type in Bitcoin to find. Then do some research on the net to find the historical premium the ETNs were trading @ the date you want to sell latter. The date I was looking @ if memory correct average was something like an extra 30% a year.

Ethereum holding period is a year. Though I have seen the premium over 6 times the value of ethereum which you would have paid market value for @ time of offering.

Though need to get around needing to be US citizen


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## m3s

MrMatt said:


> So what wallets & Exchanges are you using?


Coinbase Pro to exchange USD to ETH. Fee is about 0.5%. Need to provide official US ID for tax purposes unfortunately. The normal Coinbase didn't require US ID but the fees were 1.5% with higher spreads

Metamask wallet for ETH and gETH (test ETH). Uphold wallet for BAT. I still need to buy a hardware wallet but if I decide to run a ETH validator most of my ETH would be deposited to a smart contract for now anyways



:) lonewolf said:


> Though need to get around needing to be US citizen


Yea I really hope Canada gets on board before I move back. Switzerland accepts BTC and ETH for tax payments now ffs

I've been listening to Unchained podcast while running and there's a lot of interesting development in DeFi right now


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## m3s

The testnet is being stress tested the past few weeks as people seemed to move to some of the smaller testnets and neglected to gracefully exit (and/or people are purposely stressing the network)

My RAM climbed to 10GB at one point but after a restart it was back down to 6GB. The stress test has knocked out the Raspberry Pi users who were already at their limits with 8GB RAM. This has changed the recommended RAM from 8GB to 16GB. There is also a huge difference depending which software client you chose to use. They all get better with upgrades as this is really what the testnet is for.

The 10 year old laptop is holding up great and I'd be comfortable to use it for mainnet phase 0. If it fails my backup would be to sign up for a cloud computing service. This is likely what I would end up using as a cloud service is probably more reliable than managing my own

Things should get interesting in the next week as the network penalties increase exponentially when 1/3rd of nodes fail to vote. This will force out the nodes who haven't voted so that the remaining nodes can reach the required 2/3rd consensus


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## m3s

The testnet recovered early Nov as inactive nodes got kicked. It was a good strees test for both software and hardware. My laptop shutdown the first time in 3 months. Seems the CPU hit threshhold temps from the system logs. The developers improved the clients so much during that period now I am running on much less RAM and the databases are smaller too

I exited my testnet validators today. Tore the laptop apart to clean and apply new CPU thermal paste. I had to completely dissemble it to clean the CPU which was very risky - eh it's a 10 year old laptop why not try? It didn't boot at first and I thought that was that. Tried reseting the battery, NVRAM, swapping out the RAM and SSD.. no luck.. Then I tried reconnecting the tiny display cable and voila! It lives another day!

Eth2 phase 0 is set to kick off on Dec 1 given enough validators are ready in time. In the meanwhile I reformatted Ubuntu, setup a firewall and timesync server in prep to sync an Ethereum 1 mainnet node. I will watch for now I'm not completely decided if I want to lock 32 ETH into this as the price climbs towards $500 USD per ETH


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## m3s

ETH is now hitting $600 USD
Earned 0.1125 ETH in the first 7 days (about $65 USD at today's price)
It paid my monthly internet bill in 4 days
I'm still using the old SSD and 2011 laptop (no hardware expenses)

SSD 160 of 500GB
HDD 200 of 750GB
RAM about 8 of 16GB
Internet about 10 of 100 Mbps, 250GB data

It ran at 100% this week and I didn't touch it. There was a power bump while I was at work but thanks to the laptop battery it didn't miss a vote
I expect to need new hardware before phase 1 or 1.5


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## MrMatt

What do you think about the new ETH ETFs?


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## m3s

Which ETF?

I know of Grayscale which has been buying up a lot of BTC and ETH. This would make sense for someone who wants to buy/trade digital assets without opening another exchange. Might also simplify taxes

I see there are some other ETFs that hold companies investing in blockchain technology such as IBM, Oracle, Visa, Square, Paypal, Invidia. I don't see the point of those ETFs when those companies are so few and blockchain is such a small part of their business

Paypal, Square and Visa are jumping on board before they become irrelevant but if crypto becomes mainstream the point is to cut out these intermediary leeches.. Invidia is for the mining hardware but mining is being phased out of ethereum now

I would love to invest in centralized exchanges like Coinbase or Binance.. decentralized exchanges will replace them for swaping crypto assets but they are the easiest way to convert traditional fiat to digital assets

Also I am earning +3% by lending stablecoins on DeFi now (tied to USD) Canada does not consider this to be income yet (this is stupid and will hopefully change imo)


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## m3s

ETH is now approaching $700 USD
Earned .0996 ETH in the second week (about $67 USD at current USD price)
All expenses were covered in the first week

SSD 175 of 500GB
HDD 200 of 750GB
RAM 8 of 16 GB
Internet looks like about 1TB data/month (more peers = more data transfer which can be adjusted)

Looks like I missed 1 hr of voting 1 night (lost 1 hour of income + 1 hour of inactivity penalty or about 0.50 USD) I haven't had a chance to investigate what happened but I will watch in case it happens again.

I spent about 5 mins updating the clients and Linux (restarted laptop without even missing a vote which is about every 6 mins)


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## m3s

Over 2M ETH deposited into ETH2 in the first month (over 1.5B in USD)
Estimated APY is now 10%

First month-
Earned .42 ETH or $310USD at current price
SSD 225 of 500GB
HDD 200 of 750GB
RAM 8 of 16 GB
Internet looks like about 1.5TB data/month (more peers = more data transfer which can be adjusted)
You don't need much bandwidth but you need reliable internet without expensive data caps

There is only 1 real internet provider available to me. They quietly changed their plans for 2021 with all the typical cable tv package bundle scams. To get unlimited data I had to upgrade to a complete package that includes a gateway/router I didn't want and faster internet I didn't need

For the added cost I might as well rent a cloud computing service and manage this with an SSH tunnel. This is probably what I will end up doing rather than upgrading my 10 year old hardware when the time comes. AWS (amazon) announced some kind of Ethereum node service

Downtime-
Weekly software updates didn't cause any downtime and aren't that necessary.
Cable company locked out my owned router before I was home to install the provided "rented" gateway. I was able to test LTE data as a backup (worked but would become expensive)
Cable company rented router needed to be reset already and caused another hour of downtime


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## m3s

Second month-
Earned .32 ETH or $425USD per validator at current price
SSD 225 of 500GB
HDD 200 of 750GB
RAM 12 of 16GB

I had to upgrade my internet plan this month when the only ISP capped data at 1.2TB. This is the first expense for this hobby because I'm still using the old laptop. The internet came bundled with significantly "faster speed" (no perceivable improvement even for gaming because the latency is the same)

No downtime
I think I updated the laptop once this month which takes about 5 mins.

I've been buying Cardano this month instead and learning how its network works. I see this as the biggest competition to ethereum. It will be interesting to see how both networks develop over the coming years


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## andrewf

That's a lot of traffic (1.2TB). Was this an ostensibly 'unlimited' plan that the ISP has a soft cap on?

I guess it would make sense to use a cloud host, but that would probably eat all your income, right?


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## m3s

It was an unlimited plan (if there was a soft cap I never noticed or triggered it during testing) Had they announced the hard data cap in Nov instead of Dec I prob wouldn't have started this - but the additional cost is covered so far

It's hard to say exactly what the data usage is and I could manage it somewhat by capping the number of peers. The whole purpose of rewarding nodes for staking is to add another data node for the health and security of the network so I would rather not restrict peers and data. I do have a 3rd party fallback service setup that I could probably use with much less data transfer but again it kind of defeats the purpose of decentralization

There are professional staking services now with very good introductory rates. I'm just watching for now how things play out but I'll probably end up migrating to a cloud or a pool. Even the exchanges will stake for you now for about 15% fee


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## MrMatt

andrewf said:


> That's a lot of traffic (1.2TB). Was this an ostensibly 'unlimited' plan that the ISP has a soft cap on?
> 
> I guess it would make sense to use a cloud host, but that would probably eat all your income, right?


I'm with a TPIA, and I haven't had a month below 1TB in years, with the kids home I've hit over 2TB quite a few times.
Never had a problem.


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## m3s

First 3 months yielded 1 ETH per 1 validator. What the laptop cost new 10 years ago was repaid in a month or 2 and at this rate my initial investment into ETH will covered within the first year

The laptop fan was starting to make noise. It cost $10 on amazon to replace and took me 10 mins to swap. Running nice and quiet again now. Laptop has been going 24/7 since August


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## m3s

First 5 months have now yielded more than my initial investment in ETH, hardware and expenses at current ETH prices. There are also several exchanges and apps that pay +6% (variable) for ETH

ETH chain has been growing fast and I was about to need a new SSD - however a new upgrade to the ethereum clients let me prune the database back down. Ethereum 2 merge is now expected in the fall


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## MrBlackhill

European Investment Bank (EIB) issues first ever digital bond on a public blockchain (Ethereum)








EIB issues its first ever digital bond on a public blockchain


On 27 April 2021, the EIB launched a digital bond issuance on a blockchain platform, deploying this distributed ledger technology for the registration and settlement of digital bonds, in collaboration with Goldman Sachs, Santander and Societe Generale.




www.eib.org


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## james4beach

MrBlackhill said:


> European Investment Bank (EIB) issues first ever digital bond on a public blockchain (Ethereum)


All bonds in the financial system are already digital, electronic only. All major currencies and money transactions, including stocks and bond, are digital.


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## m3s

Digital is nothing new but blockchains and smart contracts are still hard to fathom for many. Bonds, stocks, real estate etc will all be on blockchains this decade.

Europe is also testing Ethereum for their CBDC. Personally I think Cardano will be better for CBDCs


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## rossalex

It’s interesting. I really like ethereum, and I’m happy that I could buy a good amount of it two years ago. It is one of my favorite altcoins, and it made me a good amount of money until the bitcoin crash. I lost 39 percent of my money. At first, I was frustrated, but then I was lucky enough to invest in Atari right before the boxing match, making half of my money back. Now I’m investing into Cardano and I think that it is going to be the best altcoin in the game. You’d probably ask me where can i buy ada ? Well, just go on uphold and follow the instructions. Crypto is the future and I’m sure that people that are investing today will benefit in 5-10 years.


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## m3s

Arbitrum launches the first real potential scaling solution for ethereum today that is desperately needed

Offchain Labs Rolls Out Arbitrum One Ethereum Scaling Solution to the Public

Impressive team of "shadowy super coders" behind this as Elizabeth Warren would call them



> Offchain Labs was co-founded by Ed Felten, former deputy U.S. chief technology officer in the Obama White House and longtime Professor at Princeton University. Ed started working on Arbitrum while at Princeton University where he met his co-founders, Steven Goldfeder and Harry Kalodner. The three detailed the Arbitrum technology in a research paper while at Princeton that was published in 2018 once Ed returned from the White House. Offchain was officially born while the three were at Princeton with a mission to scale Ethereum and bring it to the masses. Steven holds a PhD from Princeton University and Ed and Steven are two of the authors of the leading textbook on cryptocurrencies, _Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies_.


Eth and Eth 2 could merge as soon as Dec 1 (just speculating as that would be the 1 year anniversary of Eth 2) This would end the energy intensive mining and significantly increase staking yields

🤞


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## wayward__son

Bullish


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## m3s

1 year since Ethereum beacon chain went live on 1 Dec 2020

The merge is coming early 2022 and amazing L2 tech is going live. StarkNet looks like it will be the most advanced and scalable L2 and it just launched the alpha mainnet. It only gets cheaper with more users. Users will be able to go straight to L2 and skip the L1 ethereum fees

I'm up about 50x on my first validator earing over 5% in ETH and the rewards will only increase post merge. Ethereum volume, activity and development is growing beyond my wildest dreams. I don't want to use L1 anymore but I want to own and stake L1 ETH

I'll most likely switch to Rocket Pool for the pooled rewards, better UI, liquid staking etc. They even plan to move rewards to a L2 and then it would be perfect. Anyone can use Rocket Pool with any amount of ETH and you don't need to run your own node

I'll probably run it from a good cloud service. The poor 2011 MacBook Pro has done its time.


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## m3s

bgc_fan said:


> Any thoughts about using a raspberry pi for this sort of thing? Processing power isn't as powerful, but decreased electrical requirements.


People are running mainnet Rocket Pool nodes on Raspberry Pi without issues by the way.

Personally I would wait to see how the merge goes but I plan to get a Raspberry Pi to learn Rocket Pool testnet

You also want a good 1TB SSD or 1.5-2TB for future proofing


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## m3s

SSD filled up today.

I checked it recently so I'm not sure what happened. I believe the ancient directory moved to the SSD somehow but I just nuked it all instead of worrying what happened

I took the opportunity to update everything as there was also a major update to my ETH2 client yesterday. If I run just the ETH2 validator pointed to an external ETH1 node it runs very quiet on 4GB RAM. Now I need to rebuild the ETH1 node from scratch which I planned to do before the ETH2 merge anyways.

It's impressive that a 2011 laptop is still running at all let alone processing a full ethereum node/validator 24/7. This is the first time I've had to react to any issue


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## m3s

Ethereum testnet just merged and is now full proof of stake

ETH price was $200USD when this thread started and is now $1800USD. Even at $1000 "lows" it is still orders of magnitude higher than when I accumulated for this staking. Rewards for stakers are set to increase drastically and selling pressure from mining rewards will also disappear. I'm really not concerned about the price but for those who are

I missed proposing a block back in Feb and that's when I decided to move to the cloud. The cloud is more reliable, flexible and easier to account for business expenses. On a monthly basis fees are covered in less than a day so not a concern. I still participate in testnets but I mostly focus on other far more lucrative projects now

18-24 months to mainnet merge is right about what was expected. I much prefer to use other chains now but I'll continue to collect these rewards


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