Thread by @econoar

Some of the most important takeaways from the Ethereum 2.0 Researchers AMA today. Note, some comments are cut down to fit in tweets.

1. @VitalikButerin on unsolved challenges: "I really honestly think that there are no unsolved research challenges at this point."

2. On when Beacon Chain could start finalizing the Eth 1.x chain: "My best guess is early 2021." -@drakefjustin

3. On ETH 2.0 complexity - "It got considerably simpler over the last year... There's a lot of things in eth2 that are much simpler than eth1. But there's definitely lingering complexity and I deeply care about minimizing it." -@VitalikButerin

4. On client diversity: "I expect consolidation—a bunch of clients may not survive 2020."

"A minimum of two production-ready clients are necessary for launch. I expect the first-mover advantage to be strong."

-@CarlBeek

5. On inactivity leak:

"If your validator node goes offline for 18 days, and the beacon chain is not finalizing, then your balance will be reduced by "up to 60.8% slash in 18 days".

-@CarlBeek

6. On slashing:

If a validator behaves provably maliciously, then they are slashed by having their balance reduced. Assuming client software is written well, this should be basically impossible to happen to you. Minimum penalty is 1 ETH, but it goes up linearly.

-@CarlBeek

7. On attacks:

"One of the beautiful things about PoS is that these attacks can be handled with grace. The community can hard-fork out the malicious actors so they have no more voting power. The malicious actors just burnt a lot of money to temporally halt a network. -@CarlBeek

8. On Eth1>Eth2 migration

"The current approach is to fold eth1 into eth2 as an execution environment. In practice, this will mean that we would need to have a hard fork on the eth1 side to rebalance some gas costs...." @VitalikButerin

9. On wealth inequality

"But I still think that PoW is not better than PoS from an inequality point of view, because although PoW does distribute coins into "fresh hands", you need so much capital to become a PoW miner that it's a big rich-get-richer mechanic." @VitalikButerin

10. On Phase 1/2 spec freeze:

"Phase 2 is a bit too far out to say, but my hope for phase 1 is Q3/4 of this year." -@CarlBeek

11. On planned downtime/pause button:

"The closest to a "pause" button is to first exit (which can take as little as half an hour, but may take days/weeks since there's a queuing mechanism) and later re-activate." -@drakefjustin

12. On current contract migration:

"The current plan is that eth1 will be folded into eth2 as an execution environment via the stateless client approach, in which case, yes, contracts will keep working as expected." -@VitalikButerin

13. Eth2 v Eth1 perf:

"2.0 removes the disk I/O bottleneck for consensus participants by heavily leaning towards stateless clients. Finality greatly mitigates the sync latency bottleneck, and the requirement for consensus participants to store historical blocks." @drakefjustin

14. When issuance reductions?

When the PoW chain starts piggybacking on the PoS chain for security (this could happen during phase 1 or phase 2), it becomes safe to lower the PoW chain reward by maybe ~4x. Further reductions would happen when PoW stops entirely. -@VitalikButerin

15. Thoughts on when exchanges list Eth2:

"Transfers will probably only go live in Phase 1 at which point exchanges will list ETH2.0. Having exchanges to so will help maintain price-parity between ETH and ETH2.0." -@CarlBeek

16. Bridge:

The uni-directional Eth1>Eth2 bridge comes with the beacon chain. I'd say it's likely there will be a bi-directional bridge eventually (though unlikely to happen in 2020). Even better than a bi-directional bridge is native integration of Eth1 into Eth2 @drakefjustin

17. DeFi vs staking:

Compound rates for ETH are ~0.02% AFAIK, so very easy to compete with. The "do you take 3% interest staking or 6% lending DAI on Compound" framing is highly misleading, because that 6% is on USD, which is very different to having 3% on ETH. @VitalikButerin

18. How to run 10 validators?

A laptop should be sufficient. We'll know more in a few months when the numbers for block sizes and gas limits of shard blocks get finalized. - @VitalikButerin

19. Beacon nodes rewards?

Beacon nodes that are not validators are not rewarded in protocol because the protocol can't tell who's a beacon node vs just pretending to be one. Though non-validator nodes may be able to earn money in eth2 through incentivized light client protocols.

20. Expectations on final throughput:

"Somewhere between 5000 and 500000 TPS depending on what execution environment and transaction type you're using." -@VitalikButerin

21. Eth2 parachain on polkadot?

"I don't think EF will have to drive this. Web3/Parity are on it and I believe consider it to be a top priority.

The Shasper (Parity) client is written in substrate to help facilitate this happening." -@dannyryan

22a. Ledger growth:

"The sharded eth2.0 is expected to handle ~10MB/s of data availability. This is data that is come to consensus upon in shard chains and guaranteed to be available in at least the ~2 week time frame." -@dannyryan

22b. "This is not necessarily state size. The current approach to state and state execution is to take a "state-less" approach in which blocks must contain the merkle witnesses of the relevant state..."-@dannyryan

Sorry this was @drakefjustin