No worries, friend. There are a lot of wanna-be Marxists on reddit, so I understand overlooking the agreement.

I don't know how this is like us. I have met many college educated people who can't do these things.

I was agreeing with you. I said you are correct.

Edit: I would say that I made your point better. You simply stated a platitude. I provided the content and context so a random reader could do more research if he/she wished. If we want to persuade low-information people, we have to give them something that piques their interest and something that they can research if they desire.

End the Federal reserve and go back to a Gold (Bitcoin/Eth?) standard.

No one should have the power to direct the flow of (newly created) money where it suits them best. Level the playing field for the rest of us.

This is completely correct.

The free market was severely maimed in 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created (huh, a decade before the gilded age in the US) and it was killed in 1971 when the US left the gold standard. Look at every chart and we see a divergence of wealth towards the wealthy at a cost of the poor at these two points in time.

The Federal Reserve is a banking cartel who gets to decide which banks get bailed out and which do not. They are tightly linked to the department of the treasury who "prints" the money. The money is printed by the treasury and then distributed by the Fed. The Fed is Quasi public-privately owned. The largest banks in the US get to decide where the newly printed money goes allowing assets to be purchased, pushing up their prices before it gets to the little guys.

WTF Happened in 1971?

How about we get our spending under control and not pass this awful law ever.

If we confiscated 100% of all billionaires wealth in America (making a HUGE assumption the confiscation process doesn't destroy any of the underlying stock and company holdings value) then we would be able to fund the government expenditures ONE time for NINE months.

Link

Did you know the Revenue Act of 1913 set the tax rate on Americans earning more than $3,000 ($94,646 adjusted for inflation) at 1% per year and required the ratifying of the 16th amendment?

How do you get at least 2/3rds of the state's legislatures to ratify an amendment that allows congress to levy a tax? The same way you do today. Argue that it will only affect the rich. Then slowly lower that so it affects the middle class. Just like today.

I am taxed on my income of less than $94K at a rate much higher than 1%. Don't talk about slippery slope fallacies.

Same thing happened when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Why are you even arguing here? What point are you trying to make? Unless you put some effort into your reply, I'm not responding anymore. You have put so little effort into your responses so far. We're having a dialog. You can sum up your argument as "Nuh-huuuuuh."

.1% of a million is 1,000 solo validators. .001% is TEN. There are WAY more solo stakers than that. Do you think that the network gets extra security if 6.5% or more are solo stakers? If we can't agree on that then we just can't agree. (6.5% is 65,000)

Yes, even if the number was 1% of stakers being solo stakers, I think that they are vital.

Do you know why Crypto was even started? Hint, it's not a get rich quick scheme that so many people seem to think nowadays. It was started as an alternative money that is not controlled by the rich and powerful elite. It's not controlled by the Fed, or swayed by politics. It's just freedom money. You want to spend your money here or there. Great. Go for it bud.

The beauty and spirit of Crypto is that as long as the consensus rules are being followed it can be largely owned by the rich and powerful elite, but they are following the same rules us plebs are following, so they don't control it. The second an entity whether it be Lido, BlackRock, or Joe-momma gobbles up enough ETH to control 66% of the active validator set, they have the option to control consensus, but even then, they might not necessarily exercise that option because it would destroy most, if not all, of their value. The day that happens, you better hope that you have some honest solo validators to run their own honest fork of Ethereum, because the spirit of Crypto would live on through this forked chain, and not the centralized chain that Lido or BlackRock controls. Such a fork is known as a social layer hard fork. Crypto has 0 value in my mind if it is not possible to run a solo validator, because it might as well be a password protected excel file at that point.

I stand with my original statement. Solo validators are vital.

You make a valid point, but just because they make up a marginal percentage of the total staking base doesn't mean that they aren't the most important stakers. My blood makes up a marginal percentage of my body mass, but that doesn't negate the fact that it's vital to my well-being.

I say this, because I wish to remove roadblocks from solo stakers. Even if they are not that large of a percentage of the staking base, doesn't mean that we should abandon these very important users.

I concede that maybe my usage of the term life-blood isn't in keeping with the technical definition of the word, but I still stand by my point that solo stakers are vital to Ethereum, and we should be cognizant of any upgrades that may promote or hinder their continual existence.

Yes, but (probably) actually no.

My thinking is that it's likely in a lot of cases you run most/all of your validators on one machine and a hardware failure or even a slashing would affect all of the ones running on that same instance.

So, when you consolidate, you actually lower your bandwidth requirement (you don't have to subscribe to a subnet for each of your validators) which might actually improve attestation performance with a similar risk profile as running them all on the same machine before. In other words, you might actually be marginally better in terms of attestation rewards.

Edit: I am making the assumption based on the person who asked the initial question that he is not talking about a pool (who have their own risk mitigation strategies), so most people have fewer than 64 validator instances and are likely to run the instances that they do have on a single machine.

*Long, slightly opinionated, post following*

There is a discussion currently going on about if the ETH developers should include the option for consolidated validators to add a custom ceiling determining when the protocol will skim their excess rewards.

As a brief summary, EIP-7251 is coming in Pectra and it is going to allow users to consolidate ETH into a validator up to 2048 ETH. That is, you can have a validator staking 32-2048 ETH.

The question is how do users get their rewards if they can't/are unwilling to provide the max 2048 ETH into a single validator? They shouldn't be forced to either un-stake everything or wait until their balance reaches 2048 ETH.

There are two proposed options.

1. Allow users to set their own custom ceiling, such as 34.625 ETH. All ETH above that will be skimmed into their preferred Eth address. This is more work/complexity for the developers and staking pools. When asked about this option, staking pools don't really care if this is included or not. In my opinion this is best for solo validators because they don't have to spend any ETH to get their rewards.

2. Don't have this custom ceiling and make users sign a transaction indicating that they want to withdrawal, say, 1.257 ETH. As long as their balance remains above 32 ETH after their withdrawal and they pay a high enough fee they will be included into a block eventually. Each block will have a target of 2 user-initiated withdrawals, and there will be a fee that will increase/decrease depending on demand. This is detrimental to solo validators and smaller pools because paying a fee is disproportionately affects these smaller entities.

I am making the case for option 1. We must allow users to set a custom ceiling for the sake of solo validators.

WHY?

1. I think it's important for the Ethereum protocol to help solo validators as much as reasonably possible.

• Solo validators are the lifeblood of Ethereum. They are the most decentralized in terms of geography, internet provider, hardware, and client distribution. In my opinion, the solo validator community is the most aligned to Ethereum because they are choosing to forgo the safety and benefits of pooling their stake for what can be presumed decentralization's sake. Additionally, they retain their voting power and don't delegate it to these huge pools that can potentially be swayed to chase short-term profits to the long-term detriment of Ethereum.

2. The manual withdrawal mechanism can be spammed by large actors to the detriment of small actors whether it be solo validators or smaller competitor pools.

• If we do not have a custom ceiling, then partial rewards must be manually withdrawn as a new type of transaction. There would be a target of 2 withdrawals per block with a fee mechanism like EIP-1559. It would be a real shame if large pools 'nudged' smaller pools or solo validators to consolidate with the big pools by keeping the fee to withdraw high. Additionally, there are a lot of validators, so even honest withdrawals would keep that fee high.
• Finally, we know that pools are likely to use these new transactions a lot because they are not likely to consolidate their validators to the max 2048 for slashing protection. They are likely to consolidate maybe 10-20 validators so let's say 320 ETH. They would need to withdrawal ETH every time a user wanted their ETH back, or every time a consolidated validator needed to be brought back down to their 320 ETH comfort zone.

TL;DR I want to protect and encourage the solo validator as much as possible, and this extra option protects the solo validator's interest which outstrips the downside of added complexity. The cost of writing and testing the code only needs to be paid once, but protecting solo validators provides dividends to Ethereum for generations.

Here is a summary of the details as they stand. Let me know if you have any opinions on the matter. Maybe take it to twitter (X) and spread the word.

I think that a custom ceiling must be included for solo validators.

WHY?

1. I think it's important for the Ethereum protocol to help solo validators as much as possible.

Solo validators are the lifeblood of Ethereum. They are the most decentralized in terms of geography, internet provider, hardware, and client distribution. In my opinion the solo validator community is the most aligned to Ethereum because they are choosing to forgo the benefits of pooling their stake for what can be presumed decentralization's sake. Additionally, they retain their voting power and don't delegate it to these huge pools that can potentially be swayed to chase short-term profits to the long-term detriment of Ethereum.

1. The manual withdrawal mechanism can be spammed by large actors to the detriment of small actors whether it be solo validators or smaller competitor pools.

If we do not have a custom ceiling, then partial rewards must be manually withdrawn as a new type of transaction. There would be a target of 2 withdrawals per block with a fee mechanism like EIP-1559. It would be a real shame if large pools 'nudged' smaller pools or solo validators to consolidate with the big pools by keeping the fee to withdraw high. Additionally, there are a lot of validators, so even honest withdrawals would keep that fee high.

Finally, we know that pools are likely to use these transactions because they are not likely to consolidate their validators to the max 2048 for slashing protection. They are likely to consolidate maybe 10-20 validators so let's say 320 ETH. They would need to withdrawal ETH every time a user wanted their ETH back, or every time a consolidated validator needed to be brought back down to their 320 ETH comfort zone.

I got tired of seeing Solana go up against ETH, so I bought some today. Let's see that Eth-Solana ratio look a little more favorable to Eth now.

Yep, I am of the opinion that you always add a quarter to whatever their timeline is. They say Q4 of 2024, so I say Q1 of 2025. I love the Ethereum team, and I think that they do brilliant work, but they are always a bit too optimistic when it comes to timing. I would love to be pleasantly surprised and they could get it out by November or December of this year.

I am excited for EIP 7251 Increase Max Effective Balance to be included in the next hard fork.

Not only will it allow for large staking providers to consolidate their stake into fewer validators (this will have two important effects)
1. Less P2P traffic needs to occur, improving block propagation speeds and decreasing bandwidth requirements across the network.

1. The churn for withdrawals will happen faster. The protocol will cycle through the active validators quicker, so stakers will be able to receive their payouts more frequently.

BUT it will also have a marginal, but nonetheless important effect on the amount of outstanding liquid staking tokens.

The reason that I see, is that say you run a single validator, but you have 3 extra ETH. You don't want it just sitting there, so you perhaps trade it for stEth, or rEth. If you can consolidate, you will sell those and put them in your own validator. This will have the marginal effect of lowering the need for LST's. I don't think that this is a panacea, but I do think that it will make a small difference in lowering the % of market share that Lido controls. I would like to see Lido no higher than 22% of the market.

I believe that the devs are looking into including inclusion lists (IL) into Pectra as well. IL are execution layer (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, etc) focused, and Max EB are consensus layer (Teku, Lighthouse, Nimbus, etc) focused, meaning that different teams would be working on each upgrade.

Having been around for several cycles now. It is never a super cycle. I'm planning on DCA out of my coins as we go up, and buying heavily after major corrections of 15-30%

February 9, 12 PM PT. Source.

Yes, but then you would have to believe that they intentionally put a bug into their client so people would switch away from their competitor. Yes, it draws attention to the issue, but its bad publicity for your client if you keep having bugs. It proves the point of the people who run Geth. They run Geth because its battle tested and the other clients are buggy.

Please explain what their incentives would be to have more users. Do they get more money with more users? (Hint: No) This bug could have just as well caused people to switch to Besu.

Not that your points aren't valid, but I have the understanding that EOF will bring a lot of features and usability to smart contract code design. This may bring in more developers building more cool stuff.

Additionally, the developers will spend resources while building Prague-electra toward Verkle and this will hopefully allow them to get Verkle out next year, rather than not having an update until next year anyway.

Hi excite, I am dad.

Can you explain what Endgame Eip 1559 looks like and what it is trying to achieve?

What are your thoughts on MEV burn as a mechanism to reduce the ability of staking pools gaining an ever-larger percentage of the total stake?

Clarification of why I ask this question:

1. It is my understanding that the mean block proposal reward is higher than the median block proposal reward. Couldn't a larger protocol like Lido (all else equal) grow larger simply because they propose ~32% of the blocks and therefore they are more likely to randomly propose those crazy 200+ ETH blocks and therefore they are going to return closer to the (higher) mean block reward, whereas smaller pools/solo validators will get returns closer to the median?

2. If the above is true, then average people who are not network health conscious are incentivized to stake with an ever-larger staking pool, in a winner-take-most scenario.

It seems to me that large MEV payouts allows for large pools to offer returns greater than the mean that solo validators would get and this incentivizing pool staking, but it also creates a winner-take-most scenario.