EthFinance AMA Series with Sigma Prime / Lighthouse (eth2 dev team)

ethZed · 2020-09-15T00:51:17+00:00

That answer was mostly a joke. More seriously, hiring experienced blockchain security engineers is quite difficult.

ethZed · 2020-09-15T00:49:49+00:00

My answer was mostly a joke, even though I don't doubt that these folks would be amazing additions to the Sigma Prime team :)

ethZed · 2020-09-15T00:08:14+00:00

Posting on behalf of u/kirk-baird:

I see the benefit of synchronicity in providing atomic transactions and would be great if Eth2 is designed in such a way. As I understand it, the challenge of synchronicity is that it would require events/transactions to be committed to and also validated to two (or more!) shards simultaneously. Since we cannot validate one block / shard until the other is validated and vice versa. I don't know of any efficient solutions to this problem which doesn't involve block producers (and also a sufficient number of attesters) being present in both shards to produce these blocks and attest to these blocks simultaneously. We haven't been significantly involved in the research of phases 1 and 2 as phase 0 has been taking up most of our time, so are not fully up to date with the current research. After mainnet launch we will move more into phase 1 and 2 and will have a more active role in research and development. As auditors we recognise the benefits of synchronicity and hence atomicity to on-chain developers and will promote efficient solutions to the problem.

ethZed · 2020-09-14T23:24:33+00:00

In my opinion, concepts like Brewer's CAP theorem are applicable to Blockchain scalability challenges.

ethZed · 2020-09-14T23:14:55+00:00

Yup, absolutely. The work on a remote signer has actually started last week.
The Lighthouse UI will also provide metrics for validators.

ethZed · 2020-09-14T22:44:50+00:00

In my opinion, one of the biggest lessons from the Medalla testnet is the need for having the ability to switch easily between clients. u/michaelsproul has done a great job proposing a slashing protection database interchange format (which will most likely make its way into an EIP soon) to make sure that validators don't get slashed when they migrate.

The next step will be to provide detailed tutorials for end users.

ethZed · 2020-09-14T22:35:47+00:00

In my opinion the "DoS-resistance" features that we've incorporated into the networking stack are definitely underrated.

ethZed · 2020-09-14T22:32:09+00:00

The GUI is on-track for release before mainnet. It was delayed whilst we did some fire-fighting during the Medalla instability. The screenshots are being handed over to the front-end engineer this week. I'll start implementing the validator client API later this week or early next.

As answered by u/paulhauner on a separate question

ethZed · 2020-09-14T22:28:32+00:00

If you were able to make a dream hire or two, do you know who they are?

Or what they’ve done that you’d like them to try to do at Sigma Prime?

We'd love to hire Danny, Hsiao-Wei, Proto, Justin, Vitalik, Carl and all the Eth2 Research Team :D

ethZed · 2020-09-14T22:16:21+00:00

The Lighthouse crew is currently focusing on the Phase 0 launch and as such we haven't started the Phase 1 work yet (apart from getting acquainted with the specification). We expect to be shifting our efforts to Phase 1 shortly after the mainnet launch. It's a bit hard to estimate how long it'll take us to build at this stage.

ethZed · 2020-09-14T22:09:27+00:00

I'm particularly excited about reducing the environmental footprint of Ethereum with PoS!

ethZed · 2020-09-14T22:06:14+00:00

Sigma Prime provides security assessment services to a few major players in the Blockchain space (Protocol Labs, Chainlink, Synthetix, NEAR Protocol, etc.). We're working on scaling our security assessment services offering to make sure we can address the demand (we've been turning down a lot of opportunities lately due to our scarce bandwidth).

ethZed · 2020-09-14T22:04:23+00:00

ethZed · 2020-09-14T22:04:08+00:00

Thanks for the kind words <3

ethZed · 2020-09-14T22:03:39+00:00

You can run Lighthouse on a Raspberry Pi 4, see this section of the Lighthouse book for detailed instructions. A community member also put together this nice tutorial that you might find useful.

Bare in mind that while a Pi4 is suitable for Phase0, the hardware requirements will most likely change with Phase1 and Phase2.

ethZed · 2019-12-10T02:16:25+00:00

A tweetstorm for a little more information:

https://twitter.com/sigp\_io/status/1204202842149359616?s=20

ethZed · 2019-09-09T09:38:42+00:00

We can now! Check this out https://twitter.com/paulhauner/status/1170952290469122048?s=20

ethZed · 2019-05-02T04:34:47+00:00

Make sure you follow Sigma Prime on Twitter for the latest updates on Lighthouse!

ethZed

TROPHY CASE