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Office Hours 20 May 2022:

Running a node Q&As

Q: Individual from private fund - is it a good idea to stake ETH by running a node? DappNode, Avado or solo staking?

A: Yes, but keep in mind a difference between running a node and running a validator (given topic of "nodes")
DAppNode is an easy way to spin up a node.
DAppNode hardware/software can be used to set up an Ethereum node
DAppNode is one way to stake
Avado is a fork of DAppNode - same deal, rough feature parity
Best way to stake is to be a solo staker (deposit ETH to official staking contract and run own hardware)
Solo staking = max sovereignty over funds, privacy and control
Comes down to personal choice - you trade convenience for control

Q: What are the hardware requirements for running a node?

A Depends on the type of node. There are advanced setups that minimize the hardware requirements - e.g. Ethereum on ARM on Raspberry Pi. You could run a EL/CL combo on a normal laptop, but it is going to use up some of the RAM, storage and bandwidth that will affect the normal usage of the laptop, and the chain will have to re-sync every time you power down or reboot your personal computer. Ideally you wouldn't run it on a general-use laptop. There is dedicated hardware available e.g. NUCs. Chain currently ~1TB, so requires a 2TB SSD at a minimum (4TB if you want more flexibility and future proofing).

Q: If your hardware dies is all your ETH gone??

A No, as long as you have backed up your passwords and keys! You could run in the cloud e.g. on an AWS instance but it's not great for decentralization, ane puts you at increase risk of being part of a larger outage (which can result in higher penalties) if AWS goes down.
If your hard drive dies (mine has before), you'll just be offline until you repair the problem. In my case the hard drive failed. I purchased a new SSD, loaded DAppNode, started syncing EL/CL chains, regenerated the keys I needed from my backed up mnemonic, and loaded them into my validator client.
Total down time was maybe 2 days. Negligible in the long run.

Q: What is a node?

A Computers that run Ethereum client software allowing them to exchange Ethereum information p2p. "Places where data stops". An independent participant in the network. Running a node is "getting back to how the space started".

Q: What about updating a node for non-technical folks?

A If you're non-technical, these solutions (ie. DAppNode) make it easy - the updates are just automatic or can be easily triggered through a web app/gui. Even a node built from source is easy to update - just turn it off, pull the latest image and restart.

Q: Will we be able to run on a light client one day?

A yes, when light clients are ready!

This is a huge goal of the industry. The original crypto wallets were also nodes on the network, as they would download a copy of the chain to verify the balance of its addresses/accounts. Desite moving away from this method on our desktops, we also have seen a rise in mobile wallets over time, which make running a full node generally not possible, without some work arounds. One goal with light clients is to eventually be able to verify the state of your accounts using your own wallet again, even from a cell phone, without needing to download and hold the entire history of the chain, but also while minimizing/eliminating any trust to a single third party.

Q: Why do I care about looking up the state of the blockchain? Am I ever going to do that??

A Do you ever check your account balance? If so, you probably would prefer this to be done privately, securely, and by validating independently. We self-custody our keys but then ask someone else what our balance is, or ask someone else to submit our transactions.
This can also allow you to interact with dapps with the same privacy. This can sometimes be more complex, but with some dapps it just a matter of using your own node as the RPC from your connected wallet.

Q: Can we just make our own MetaMask?

A Yes! definitely! It's just a convenience tool!
MetaMask is just one of several wallets that exist. This one specifically was previously fully open source and was forked by the Tally community to create their own version of this wallet software.

A fundamental principle of the Ethereum blockchain is that is is permissionless to interact with. Since anyone is able to participate, anyone is free to create any software they'd like to interact with the chain, including wallets.

Q: Why run a node?

A

Personal benefit - privacy, censorship resistance, enables you to stake your ETH while holding onto your keeps. Blockchains are designed to have distributed copys amongst its users. With a personal copy of the chain, you'll end up with a convenient link called an "RPC endpoint" which you can put into many wallets, such as MetaMask. You then have the ability to look up your own balances, interact with dapps, and submit transactions all to your own node. You don't have to mine the block yourself or ask Infura to submit your transations, you just pass your tx to your own node and it gossips this our in a mix with every other valid tx it encounters.

Network benefit - network does not work without independent node operators - it is only distributed network if many people participate by running full nodes. By contributing to the decentralization of the network, you're helping strengthen the resilience of the network.

By chosing which software to run, you're chosing which rules of consensus you're supporting. Any malicious transactions being propogated on the network will land at your node, be processed, promptly shredded, and not propogated further.

If you're not running your own node, you're not able to chose which rules of consensus are being used by the provider you're relying on.

Remember, if you're an ETH holder, supporting the network supports these holdings.

Q: Do I need a separate computer for each validator

A No, multiple validators can run on a single node. Just adding more ETH to the same keys does not add to you return. You have to accrue another 32 ETH to run a separate validator (which could be attached to the same node).

"Validators" ultimately are just a pair of public/private keys that are used by your validator client to sign off on chain data*. You only need to run one chain (execution layer plus consensus layer), and one validator client which only takes one computer. That validator client, much like a wallet, can hold any number of key pairs.

Just like how you wouldn't need five computers/nodes to look up the balance of five different MetaMask accounts, just one copy of the chain will do for multiple sets of validator keys.

*A pair of keys (validator) is given that privilege after a 32 ETH deposit is made, and 32 acts as the voting power for that set of keys, which can never go above this (rewards above this don't add to a validators voting weight)

Q: Are the rewards for a validator based on the nodes uptime?

A
They are based on a number of things, but yes, rewards will be directy correlated to uptime. Your rewards are dependent on how much stake you have backing your attestation (effective balance, up to 32), how quickly your attestations are seen by the rest of the network (inclusion distance), and if a majority of the network agrees with those attestations. And of course, whether you made the attestation in the first place.
You are also rewarded for proposing a valid block when the protocol calls upon your validator to do so. These opportunities are not an every day occurance, and are unpredictable in timing. If you're offline when that opportunity comes around, you will miss out on that opportunity and those rewards.

tldr: The more uptime your node has, the more rewards your node will receive.

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Closing the gap: FDD Sybil defense model and Gitcoin Passport

Gitcoin aims to optimize capital allocation within a grants round (GR), primarily by preventing capital capture by Sybils. There are currently two independent systems in place for this that run in parallel. First, a multiplier ("Trust Score") is assigned to an individual's donation depending on their non-Sybil traits - the more likely they are to be a real human the more their donation is multiplied in the matching pool. This Trust Score is derived from evidence of personhood that a user collects in their Gitcoin Passport (GP). The other way is Sybil Account Detection (SAD) where accounts that are identified as potential Sybils by a human-in-the-loop machine-learning pipeline are "squelched" - i.e. ejected from the GR. As we move towards Grant 2.0 there is a need to optimize these processes and pivot towards a more composable Sybil defense system that can be tuned by individual grant owners to their own community's needs. Differentiating SAD from GP The fundamental difference between SAD and GP is that GP is proactive - it provides a continuous metric for a user in advance of them participating in a grant round and uses that information to define their impact. It takes into account the 'stamps' a user has in their passport, each of which provide evidence that the user is a real human, and increments their weighting in the matching pool proportionally to the weight of evidence in their passport. On the other hand, SAD retrospectively examines an individuals behaviours, generates a probability that they are a Sybil then applies a threhold to convert that probability into a binary Sybil/nonSybil outcome. SAD then retroactively removes Sybils from the round. SAD and GP have been developed in parallel but mostly independently. Having two independently-developed Sybil defense systems operating separately but in parallel hints at a future where any number of systems can run in parallel and the overall trust score is a dot-product of each trust vector. However, at the same time, there are also opportunities for synergistic relationships between anti-Sybil systems. A good first step in identifying such synergies is to compare the outcomes from SAD and GP in the latest GR to see how closely aligned they are. If both SAD and GP approaches to Sybil defense were perfect, they would silence the same accounts, and those accounts would all be Sybils. In reality there is a gap separating these two processes because each one is imperfect in its own unique ways.

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Fighting Simple Sybils: Levenshtein Distance

Sybils Quadratic funding - the mechanism that currently determines the value of Gitcoin grant funding -is inherently vulnerable to Sybil attacks. Sybil attacks are individual humans dividing themselves into multiple "virtual humans" in order to gain additional voting weight. In traditional banking and voting systems, Sybil resistance comes from "KYC" (know-your-customer) which links personal identifying information to some action. In Web3, "KYC" is generaly minimized because it undermines the core ethos of censorship resistance and permissionlessness. This means other methods are required to identify which participants in a grant round are real individual humans, and which are not. Sybil Strategies The goal of Sybil defense is to increase the investment of time and money required for an attacker to convice a grant review system that they are > 1 person to the extent that as rational attacker would not do it. Defenders constantly attempt to push this cost up while minimizing their own expenses, while attackers constantly try to pull the attack cost down. The greater the size of the exploitable pool of funds, the higher cost an attacker will be willing to pay. At the same time, extremely low-cost Sybil attacks are often worthwhile for attackers because even a low success rate can still be profitable if the attack cost is sufficiently low. This means that a robust Sybil defense structure requires systems that identify cheap, simple attacks very effectively and efficiently as well as more complex defenses against sophisticated attacks. Simple Sybils The simplest, cheapest form of Sybil attack is simply to generate a large number of addresses and try to vote with all of them. Ordinarily, these will be sifted out of the grant review system by human reviewers because they usually fail even basic proof-of-personhood checks. However, there is a substantial cost associated with these human reviews. To optimize the Sybil defense mechanism for high efficacy and low cost, detection of these cheap Sybil attacks must be automated using computationally inexpensive algorithms. Levenshtein Distance

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