eth2.0-pm VS annotated-spec

TIL, emoji votes were made to name the ETH2 protocol updates. Names of stars in alphabetical order have won, so Altair was chosen. Vitalik himself proposed naming the updates World of Warcraft zones like Aszhara. But didn't win the great emoji vote.

Merge and Eth2 dev calls today!

I'm not very technical so cannot delve into all the specifics, but from what I've read there is a proposed mechanism to allow for this in part* at the base Ethereum level - adding 0x02 withdrawal addresses for pooled distribution of priority fees, specifically. It's on the agenda for discussion tomorrow (Thursday) https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-pm/issues/220.

You can also tune in to the fortnightly dev meetings. They're streamed live to youtube.

My current understanding: The Sync Committee selects 512 validators to continually sign off on block header. Any block headers that get >2/3 are "valid"1, such that Light Clients using this header for verification can trust it.

https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/phase...

Here we have slashing fields in the block body where you insert your proofs of slashable offense. There are functions with a “slash” in the name that describes precise state transition.

The hard part of slashing is finding these proofs because you have to do more work than necessary to detect slashing and produce proofs - that’s what this software does. It’s more expensive to run a slasher but you need only one and it does not matter who runs it, anyone can run it. The link that you sent says that this slasher broadcasts proofs by default - that way anyone can include it.

According to Eth docs:

> One validator is randomly selected to be a block proposer in every slot. This validator is responsible for creating a new block and sending it out to other nodes on the network. Also in every slot, a committee of validators is randomly chosen, whose votes are used to determine the validity of the block being proposed.

The annotated code for this can be found in [2].

[1] https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/phase...

[2] https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/Sys3GLJbD#Misc

Here's some more info on Sync committees if you are interested. https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/altair/sync-protocol.md

The crux of the article is that the front-ends are all routing calls through centralized APIs to get their message included on the blockchain. Infura and Alchemy don't do much. They just pass a JSON-RPC message to an Ethereum node running on their servers. There is some additional indexing services they provide, but there are many open, decentralized alternatives for that such as TheGraph Protocol. And it's not unfeasible for an application to run its own Postgres instance to index data from the ETH blockchain.

As for full-fat clients on normal mobile devices, the main issue is the data requirements. Running a full node can take hundreds of gigabytes. It is possible on light hardware. People are running Beacon chain nodes on Raspberry Pis. But you do need the storage and that tends to be scarce on mobile.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum core devs are aware of this issue and are actively working towards it. They shipped the Altair hard fork this year that has adds sync committees which make it possible to do without needing the whole chain history (using merkle trees): https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/altai...

The light client to follow from those improvements is forthcoming:

It's not about validators going offline, it's about the validator set changing. To quote the annotated specs

Even a relatively light reading of the Annotated Spec[1] for Eth2 and/or the Eth Org's Proof of Stake FAQs[2] suggests the designers (and independent implementer-teams who gave feedback to designers... lather, rinse, repeat) understand it's important to consider the overall system "outside of the comfort zone".

[1] https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/phase...

[2] https://eth.wiki/en/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs

Alpha leak: I am currently finishing up a full revision of my annotated specification for Altair, and plan to get it published in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile Vitalik's annotated spec has some info on how base rewards work under Altair.