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annotated-spec
Vitalik's annotated eth2 spec. Not intended to be "the" annotated spec; other documents like Ben Edgington's https://benjaminion.xyz/eth2-annotated-spec/ also exist. This one is intended to focus more on design rationale.
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Article author here.
Great questions, should have explored the randomness beacon more. Ethereum uses [RANDAO](https://github.com/randao/randao), which is a distributed commit-reveal scheme where participants in the generation post a hash of their data on the commit portion and then at a later timestamp reveal the data preimage, and get slashed if they do not reveal a correct preimage. Then all participant data is aggregated together. This means if there is at least one honest participant the generation will be random.
A supermajority (2/3rds) of validators is required to finalize a block, in case of a 50-50 network partition blocks would stop being finalized and attestation rewards would stop. Non-participating validators would slowly leak stake through the inactivity leak until online validators once again had a supermajority. This is the "self-healing" mechanism that allows both safety and liveness.
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
> The implementations are also very close to formally verified if not fully formally verified.
So is Eth2, see "Formal Verification of the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain" by Franck Cassez, Joanne Fuller, Aditya Asgaonkar, paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12909) and source code (https://github.com/ConsenSys/eth2.0-dafny). More efforts to formally verify Eth2 is ongoing as well, by different entities.
> Nothing is perfect but cryptographic code has to be pretty bulletproof or a lot of systems would get owned
Same with Ethereum. The chance of having a major impact with a vulnerability is even higher I'd argue, as you can easily extract currency you can trade for USD, and the entire network is inter-connected, so finding targets to exploit becomes even easier.
Point still stands that cryptography goes over a lot of peoples head, but you don't hear those people complaining that because they don't understand it, no one does.
