r/ethstaker • u/sbdw0c • May 29 '21
Why you should stop worrying about your validator's uptime and start embracing the chaos instead
I've recently started seeing more and more people ask how a 100% uptime requirement is unfair, or how they wish there were a certain number of "days off" validators could take. This, in my opinion, is a very fundamental misunderstanding of what the requirements are, and what you are rewarded for in the first place.
When you sign up to become a validator, you're locking up 32 ether and promising to uphold the integrity of the network by participating in its consensus. Do your attestation duties correctly and you will be rewarded. Fail to do so, and you will be penalized instead. Or worse, act maliciously against the network and you will be slashed and then thrown out: scary, right? Not so much.
The very first thing to understand is that there is no uptime requirement per se. You are incentivized to be online and disincentivized to be offline, but nothing is stopping you from turning your validator off for a day while you move to a new home, or because you accidentally formatted your entire drive. You will never be thrown out of the network for missing one attestation: don't worry about it.
Currently, the beacon chain is handing out roughly 7% of the locked up ether in rewards to validators annually. This varies validator-to-validator, and your exact annual rewards will vary slightly based on luck (block proposals) and how well you perform your validator duties (online status, block propagation, correct votes).
If one deposits 32 eth into the deposit contract and starts validating, they can expect to earn roughly 2.24 ether during a year of validating duties, or 5600 units of your favorite stablecoin.
Penalties: don't worry about them
Your friend has done their attestation duties flawlessly since genesis. However, now they've had to unplug their machine for a whole day so they can move to a new apartment. What happens to their rewards?
If their validator was offline for a whole 24 hours, they would be right back where they were after 24 hours of validating. So, 24 hours of downtime and 24 hours to earn back the incurred penalties: 48 hours of lost validating time! This major loss would hammer that sweet 7.00% APR down by... A whopping 0.04% points, all the way down to 6.96%, meaning they are now projected to earn 5568 dai instead of 5600 dai.
What about the person who left for a holiday abroad and their validator stopped attesting the moment they boarded the plane, only realising this when they got back home a week later? They boot the machine back up, and after a week of attestation duties they're back to their pre-vacation balance. All in all, their validator taking a week's vacation resulted in two weeks of lost attestation rewards, or 3.85% of the entire year's rewards! What happened to their projected APR? Well, it went from 7.00% to 6.73%, or from 2.24 eth to 2.15 eth: a loss of roughly 225 dai.
This might sound expensive, even, but keep in mind that this is not a penalty you will pay, but rather an opportunity loss: you haven't strictly speaking paid anything, you've only missed out on the opportunity to earn more. You've earned 5375 dai instead of 5600 dai — remember the perspective!
In reality, being offline for a whole week is easier said than done: beaconcha.in has a wonderful email/app notification system so you know right away if something isn't right. If you've set up VPN access to your home network, which is extremely simple, fixing things can be done even from the other side of the planet. If the issue is a simple power outage, you will (hopefully) have configured your validator to automatically spring itself back to life the moment the power returns.
In short, don't worry about the rewards you may miss out on due to being offline. The penalties are fair and lenient, and are there only to promote the health of the network; they're not there to spite you or make you miserable.
On staking hardware
Do not over-engineer your setup with redundancies: this only makes it more likely for you to shoot yourself in the foot. If you have unstable power, as in regular power outages, consider investing in a UPS. If you have singular power outages a year or none at all, don't bother with the UPS: save the money instead.
I would also advice against investing in so-called enterprise-grade hardware. Don't splurge on an ancient racked PowerEdge with 16 Xeon cores and 128 gigabytes of RAM: buy a NUC or a micro-PC instead, or something that won't pull half a kilowatt from the wall and sound like a jet plane taking off.
Simply put, modesty is the key to staking hardware. Get something that's small, quiet, and power-efficient — if you want peace of mind, splurge on a quality SSD. Set it up, forget about it, update the software when the client teams suggest you to do so.
What about you, OP?
My set-up is pretty cost-efficient. I bought a used Dell micro-PC for 30 euros, which came with 4 GB of SO-DIMM DDR3. I ran with the 4 GB setup during the initial testnets, but upgraded to 16 GB for mainnet so I could run my own eth1 node.
Setup:
Dell OptiPlex 9020M (the small one)
Intel i3-4150T
two cores/four threads, 3 MiB L3
3 GHz with no turbo-boost + slight undervolt
35 W TDP, 22 nm, Haswell
all mitigations enabled
16 GB SO-DIMM DDR3, non-ECC
Samsung QVO 870 SSD (1 TB)
if you want peace of mind, consider a quality SSD that's not QLC
four-year-old Asus router with Asuswrt-Merlin, comes with a built-in OpenVPN server
impressively stable; does 100+ days of uptime regularly, only rebooted for firmware upgrades
Cost distribution:
computer (30 euros, used)
16 GB of memory (45 euros, used)
1 TB QVO SSD (110 euros, new)
Total 185 euros (225 USD)
