Thread by @TimBeiko

.@gladstein thanks for engaging! These are all good questions. The answers may not all be tweet-sized, so here's a thread to go through them 🧵

https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1377333309802311683

You can see the current numbers for yourself here: beaconcha.in/pools. One important thing to note is that Ethereum's PoS algorithm uses penalties that are correlated with how many other people do something wrong along with you.

https://mobile.twitter.com/gladstein/status/1377333376294658050

This means that while we can't stop people from staking on AWS, or using the most popular client, etc. we can give them an economic incentive to setup their staking node in a way where their failures are uncorrelated from the rest of the network.

Alongside that, Ethereum's Pos aims for validators to be profitable if they are online >2/3 of the time. This means it is much less risky for folks to stake on non-production-grade infrastructure.

But, to answer explicitly, as of today, we see 26% staking from exchanges, 15% via pools and the rest is a mix.

TL;DR: yes, and we are exploring ways to disincentivize that. Although, to be clear, MetaMask doesn't really matter here given it's not used to perform any staking duties, it's just an Ethereum wallet and there are already a multitude of options for those

https://mobile.twitter.com/gladstein/status/1377333496499236866

Specifically, we are planning to ask validators to provide proofs that they actually have a copy of the data. See here for more details: ethresear.ch/t/a-0-001-bit-…

That is the cost for a single staker, yes, but there are already decentralized staking pools for people who want to stake with less, see @LidoFinance @Rocket_Pool.

https://mobile.twitter.com/gladstein/status/1377333585724719105

A full explanation for why 32 ETH was chosen specifically can be found here: github.com/ethereum/annot…

Re: the 32ETH min dropping, it hasn't been discussed yet, but I suspect if there was a way to do it without significant downsides, it likely would happen. Very early iterations of the PoS design had a ~1000 ETH min, and when it was discovered we could do less, it was lowered.

The short answer, as with all blockchains, is "social consensus".

https://mobile.twitter.com/gladstein/status/1377333648152621057

The best summary of Ethereum's social consensus around monetary policy is "minimum necessary issuance", which is expanded on here: docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-basic…

This obviously is less straightforward than Bitcoin (though potentially more viable, but that's another debate 😅). EIP-3368, which I mentioned yesterday, is an example of a proposal being rejected because it went against this ethos.

Yes, that sounds roughly right for *issuance*. The wide range is because the issuance is based on how many people are staking. The rewards for staking drop as more people join so that the protocol targets a safe but not excessive number of stakers.

https://mobile.twitter.com/gladstein/status/1377333690900996097

The EthHub link has the specific numbers in a table: docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-basic…

While these numbers are for issuance, it is worth noting that Ethereum will introduce a "fee burn" this summer (EIP-1559). That change could be its own thread, but in short, it burns a large % of all transaction fees, reducing supply. The % burnt increases with blockspace demand.

So, if you had a fairly low issuance from staking and a fairly high burn from transaction fees, the Ether supply could be deflationary, which strikes a nice balance between limiting inflation and ensuring a long-term budget for validator rewards.

TL;DR: pseudorandomly.

https://mobile.twitter.com/gladstein/status/1377333740439961602

The spec lays out exactly how this happens: github.com/ethereum/annot…

I also found this link helpful: github.com/ethereum/annot…

And that's it! Happy to answer follow ups.

If you are looking to dive in deeper, the Eth2 annotated spec I linked right above, this 1559 list hackmd.io/@timbeiko/1559… and @ethhub_io are all great resources!