What am I doing? Yeah, I am attempting to unfuck something with super glue before we go live because I probably won't have a chance to do it
before tomorrow and then I'll be thinking about it all of tomorrow. So that's why I was like, I'll just quickly fix this. I can
I can finally get some rest, eh?
Welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast from Independent Validator Teams.
Hello and welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast from Independent Validator Teams. And this week we're going to be talking about the final couple of stages in the world to
Spain. What ultimately happened with SEPCUS, spoiler alert, he won the GC, taking it out above his teammates, Yonas Vingogod and Primoz Roglic, who slipped down to third after Vingogod's attack, which we discussed in the last podcast.
So what did you guys think on the final GC standings in the Vuelta? It turned out it was all a bit of a nothing burger, really, the internal politics of Jumbo Visma.
Do you think it's going to have some impact on them as we kind of moved into the mid-season, like the end of the season, Italian classics, and then, you know, next season, what they might, we might be thinking of in terms of GC and the Grand Tours?
I have no idea what in the fuck you're talking about.
I swear to God, you made up every one of those terms in there. Those are not real names.
Are they even real words?
Real words is all the real sport. It's all actually kind of, yeah, it's not, I don't think any of that was, there were no takes. There were no takes in bowl.
But no, it's just kind of the end of the Vuelta, as many was not as exciting as it could have been, although.
Are you talking about football?
Cycling. Cycling, yeah.
SEPCUS football.
Football? I mean, I say football a lot, but I don't actually watch football.
What is that?
Is it train spotting where the girls come out there?
What are you all talking about?
Bo.
What are you all talking about?
Sharpen.
Yeah.
That's the one.
Yeah, somebody I know basically came, he was going to visit his cousin, right?
So he came up to, he went up to the city where he lived and he knew he was going to have like a few hours before he saw him and he wouldn't have anything to do.
And he was like, fuck what do I do?
And so he went and bought a football on his way to the train station and then went like 300 miles across the country with this football under one arm.
And then when he got there, just got, went near to the place where he's meeting his mate, saw a park and then just started like kicking a football round on his own.
And then a group of lads were like, man, you just, we just, I just went for some guys, but yeah, we can have a kick around while, you know, fucking always late, aren't they?
And then he just started a big game of football in the park.
It was like football.
And then was ages late to meet his actual cousin who was there to meet.
And then when he came, he turned up, barged his way into this place.
His, his cousin was not there yet, by the way.
Everybody was late in the story.
And this guy just knocks on the door.
They open the door.
He kicks a football through the door and goes football.
And they're like, sorry, what?
And he just like goes, kind of conga lines his way into the house, cracking a beer as he goes.
And they're like, is that so and so's mate?
Is that his cousin?
Who are we expecting today?
And he's like football.
What are you doing?
What have you been doing?
And then his cousin arrives and he's like, all right, mate, what we've been doing the last few hours.
It's like football.
So yeah, that's a story about football.
Where football was said a lot.
And then there was a big house party there and everybody was saying football.
And then a bunch of those lads went to Glastonbury Festival with a massive flag.
They got a flag made up six by four foot that said football.
And then it ended up on in the B on the BBC in the UK.
They show the festival footage and they just kept panning to this flag and being like, hmm, some football fans in the audience.
It's a story about football.
Was that held by Seb Coose?
Seb Coose, as it turned out, was the guy with the football.
That's the answer.
What's that?
The American cousin.
He was the American cousin.
He was over from, where is he from?
Colorado?
No, I think, yeah, I think we said we thought it was Wyoming, but it wasn't Wyoming.
I think it was Colorado.
Yeah, Schultz got really excited about Wyoming.
Then it did.
I said Wyoming.
I get really excited because there was somebody somewhat famous, although that's a stretch.
He'll be famous.
He'll be famous now, though.
Is he?
Because, you know, you're lackluster.
When his, how he got the time gap initially was a cracking, cracking piece of cycling.
Oh, I don't want to hear about it.
You just go watch the stage.
And also a board.
He blurred himself out.
He's really good at how he can have wank.
What the fuck's going on?
This can't.
Lovely.
So I had, well, I will, I also have it.
Yes.
So for those, so do you want to go straight into Nell's News Corner?
And in the meantime, I'm going to troll the chat.
We fucking discuss that there is no new Nell's News Corner.
Robin did a really good job last week.
Sprinkle the news during the episode.
Fucking.
I'm going to.
Not the fucking banner, please.
Fuck.
The banner.
I'm exhausted.
The omniflex team.
Actually, your boy, Joseph, who I think works on your team, right?
But Joe, Joe, is he part of omniflex as well?
Does he do work for both?
Or is he kind of like an ambassador there?
Or is that part of King Nils or what's the story?
No, he, he like, he does some work for them as well.
So he asked, they're doing an omniflex chat today, which was really cool.
Like, then they want to do like, they do like validate around tables and just ask
some questions and things like that.
That was on a Twitter space this morning, East Coast time.
And I was thinking it was like a half an hour.
I think we were on that thing went on for like two hours.
And so I'm a little bit spent.
It was good though.
Like we talked a lot about governance and I shed on that a little bit.
They talk about validator operations.
There were a lot of good questions from community members around different types
of things.
And somebody, an NFT collection holder was asking a bunch of questions around
whether NFT teams should start validators and what that means.
So I had some opinion.
What was the, like, what was the general gist of those?
Like, so, okay, a couple of things with omniflex.
First of all, I assume that the validator expansion was an item of discussion.
It was actually it wasn't early on.
And then Cislik hop hop down.
And that's, I guess, that's omniflex prop 16.
And so we collectively said that every change should now probably just skip
number 16 props.
16's of video.
Yeah.
It's like an auto veto.
It's kind of like, like hotel level, you know, floor 13, you just skip it.
And so from prop 15 to 17.
But prop 16 omniflex.
I voted abstain.
Usually I would vote no on these.
And so they were just like, you first, somebody else said Bill, talk about it.
I had voted abstain and then I changed it to no.
Yeah, I probably will as well.
I'm not sure if the votes still open.
I said, I said, I probably would too.
So I, you know, I was very open around, you know, Cislik brought up because I think,
I think they're in a tough spot.
I think most change are tough spot about this because I think ultimately they
don't want to expand the set because just those block times, there's really no
benefit, but they want to be able to support what the community wants.
And I was just saying it was, you know, a little bit of theater and it's better
to kind of really work more around changing the Nakamoto and, you know, getting
that getting that number higher and try to try to work on the top of the chain,
not the bottom of the chain, because who gives a shit about five validators
joining it.3% total?
Like, it doesn't fucking matter.
Like it's not doing anything.
And so, yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, but I mean, like, sorry, just something you said, like the, the slower
block times and like, I don't think that the effect on like block time ends.
It's a small overhead really.
It's a bit of a hummingbird.
But it's a, it's an overhead you can't fucking get rid of.
You can't, I mean, you can lower it, right?
I mean, you can lower it.
Yeah.
You do so.
You, well, it's not, you just lower it.
Well, like, I mean, put in a fucking proposal.
It's culturally difficult to do so.
Technically, it's easy.
You just fucking put the perv holes on it and people vote on it.
And it's, it's done.
But yeah.
But people get fucking.
Well, it's like, it's like, it's like convergence on zero, isn't it?
Basically, you're just like, well, eventually.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it does, it does increase the overhead.
I mean, I mean, like, like say, I mean, say wouldn't, I don't think say would be able
to do it at 50, much less 75.
It clearly wouldn't be able to do it at 100 validators, right?
Like, what do you mean?
Oh, it would be a fucking function.
Yeah.
Like it would, like they would never get, they would never keep that block time.
They would never like it.
Just, there's just, there's just a speed of light issue here.
They would some of these types of things.
They would, but the, the, so the shittiest performing validators would always be getting jailed.
They would just, yeah, they would just get completely messed every time.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, it depends on light and he's too low.
Not just shitty performing, but if, if everyone was in Germany and two data centers, then you
probably, you could probably make it work.
But, but even that, it ended up like really centralized because people would be like fighting
to make sure they're in that top fucking 67% that does the signing and people who don't
make it in time.
So it would be like the network would wait for 67% and then sign and then whoever didn't
make it would get fucking eventually jailed because they're obviously running the shitty
hardware.
So that's right.
So it'd be like people would have to, people would be jacking up their hardware to like
be first and then.
That's what we do on say.
Like, like not, not from a validated perspective, but like our ability to keep a zero lag.
If, if the farther you move away from Germany, the harder it is for that node to stay active
or to stay, to stay on lag zero because, or to stay at the, at the height, because you
can actually watch, like I can watch logs coming across and there's a, there's a speed
of light issue here as well on my logs, right?
Because I'm getting logs from halfway across the earth, which is 200 milliseconds no matter
what.
And, and you have block times of 387 milliseconds.
So by the time I see them, it's kind of fucked.
But I've noticed that I need to have stronger hardware the farther I am, I am away from
Germany.
Like the node needs to be faster because the blocks are coming in delayed.
Right.
So I can run that quick to get it back in time.
You got it.
So I can, I have to run like, like 79, like 70, like 50s or those types of things in the
US where in Germany, I can run 2388s because I think the node actually needs a process
to block somewhat faster to be able to do that.
Now, how scientific that is, I don't, I don't really know.
I've just, I'm just kind of watching it.
And frankly, those are the cost difference of those is not a big deal.
So it's not really that big of a deal.
But, but because we were talking to like other, because I was working with a bunch of, I don't
know how we get in the stomach, but we were with a bunch of CEX's that are on say, and
they're all running at AWS.
And, and some of those are having real trouble like staying on, on, on the, on the, on the
head, and part of that is because there, there's a lot of bad peers and say, because I think
people run lower nodes and then they're in the peer book and then you start peering against
nodes that are lagged way out, right?
And those types of issues.
But also they're, they need to really bump the specs and their specs are like ridiculously
high at AWS.
Like they're crazy expensive because they, they need to have fast processing time.
Crazy expensive on AWS and was like, hold on.
I'm talking to semi scripts.
They're running, they're running nodes that are $1.75 an hour plus, plus egress on say,
which is like fucking crazy, right?
There's a lot of data depending on how many, how many, and there are purely like 200 peers.
So it's probably,
You're, you're nodes are $1.77 an hour, bro.
Yeah.
I can also, it's probably a five to $7,000 a month node.
Like it probably is like when you get into it, like it's, it's crazy.
That's what we were spending on app today.
I know.
Well, you, but you actually had, well, all right.
You had two nodes.
We had dedicated IOPS as well.
I like reserved.
Yeah.
Well, because the disc was the big bottleneck.
So I kind of, I kind of, I'd have to look back in our configuration in the Terraform,
but I think we were, I think something like 64,000.
I would say a hundred, but no, I think it might be thousand IOPS.
It was a huge number.
I think I like IO one, I think it's 64,000.
It's like 64,000.
That's all sand based.
I don't even know what the hell that is.
That has to be like, I don't even know, I don't even know what that storage looks like.
Like it's all cash and RAM.
And then like, I don't even know what the connection is.
What like over like a hundred gig between the EC2 instances and the actual drives.
Like I don't even know how that works.
But I mean, it's all, it's all just their own virtualization mesh.
Isn't it?
It's like their own.
It's not so, yeah.
So I'm back to, back to Omiflex.
So, so basically I was just kind of, I think I might change my vote as well or to see what
I'm going to change my vote as well or to say no, but I was just kind of pooping on the,
the idea that it actually makes any sort of, any sort of difference.
And I don't even know what the buy-in and the buy-in actually was, I thought pretty high.
It wasn't like, it wasn't like, no, it's like, fuck all.
No, I thought it was like, I thought it was like $13,000 or something like that.
It counts.
Like I am like the number six.
I mean, I'm thinking of a different one.
The, the TVL of my validator is like 20 grand.
Oh, okay.
All right.
So, yeah.
So, and the other thing I was saying is like, I'm like, and even I was saying this to the
NFT holder as well, like, or the NFT group, because they were talking about, is it worthwhile?
I'm like, just assume you're, if you're going to, like, if you're going to, it's okay to
run a node, but are you going to run a node for the rest of your life?
Like, is this what you want to do?
Like, do you want to be able to support this?
Running a node is easy.
Running operations that are resilient and, and you're saying, I'm going to do this forever.
Being on page duty is fucking exhausting.
It's exhausting, right?
And then like, if this is what you want to do, I think that the thing, sorry to cut it
a little bit, but I think the thing that we perhaps have not done well, now a little bit.
Of course.
Because I was making good points here and, and I, what do I know?
I'm a tired idiot, right?
But I think one of the things we've, we've, we've talked about on the podcast before we
talked about burnout, we talked about a few other different things that kind of relate
it.
And like, obviously if you run a small business, which is inherently what all of us do, it's
quite hard to take holiday.
And you know, that's, you know, I literally in the last week or two, I've taken my first
sort of 10 day, just like I had, I had a holiday a little bit earlier in the summer for five
days.
And then I've just taken another 10 days off.
And this is like the most holiday I've taken in years and years and years and years and
years and years.
Yeah.
It's been a time of the sun and whatnot.
It's been great.
But like we're number one, you're bad at that when you're a small business to you're bad
at it when you're a validator.
And you're super, super bad at it when you're constantly on page duty and via page duty,
I know that I'm probably one of the only ones here that is relies very heavily on sort of
contract for the odd bits of additional stuff.
Like we, we, that's basically how we expand our resource base with how we work.
And the very last thing you can get people to pay, you can pay them to do is on calls.
Right.
Because anybody who's a contractor who's an infrastructure engineer is doing that so they
can get paid more for doing nine to five and never having to do fucking page duty again.
Right.
So, so inherently you end up taking almost all of, you know, that that stress and it
means that even when you do take time off to your surface point, do you want to do this
for the rest of your life?
Okay.
Maybe the rest of your life is a stretch, but you know, a lot of networks we've we'll
value 10 years, five years, 15 years, a lot of networks we validate right now have been
in production for two years now.
Right.
So, you know, this is nearly on its first birthday.
Juno's second birthday is in what, 10 days?
Ditto Stargaze.
You know, these are networks that we've been, all of us running for a couple of years in
production now.
And even if you're on holiday, even when you do decide to take a holiday, which as I kind
of got was going through there, and you need to do this, by the way, otherwise you will
eventually crash your note out because you're too tired and you're too burnt out.
So, you know, blah, blah, blah.
You don't have to mention on chains that are all losing money.
On chains that are all losing money yet.
It's not like it's like, oh, shit, I got to be up at 2am because, but I'm making, you
know, 20,000 a month or something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
But that's the thing.
Even when you're on holiday, you're still checking, you know, even if you are like, ah, this
week I'm off, I'm not going to do any work work.
You're still checking your page.
You're still, you know, checking at various times.
Sure.
So I told the story of when the first Juno cyber attack happened.
That was like in that year, I only took about four or five days off and it was basically
just immediately post COVID when we could travel.
I went spend some time with my dad and I had to cut the holiday short because of the Juno
cyber attack.
Oh yeah, I remember that.
Happen when I was off a mountain with him.
And it's just like, well, I literally had, I looked at my, we were just like, but we
was like, oh, do you want to stop and get a coffee or something?
I was like, that's a great idea.
Just pick something, you know, as you do when you stop somewhere and you're just like, oh,
just take out my phone and see what's happening.
Shouldn't have looked, shouldn't have looked.
I had it on vibrate and I was like, ah, I think it's been vibrating in my pocket.
There's a lot going on here.
A hundred messages, messages from max, all this sort of thing.
I was like, right, we need to leave.
This is done.
This shit is, we're done.
But like that's the thing, isn't it?
And, and, and, you know, back to your point as well about like talking to teams about
should we run a valovator to make money?
Well, at the moment to make money, no, because you're not going to make money.
Number one, a number two, do you have the skill?
I mean, some networks are much harder to run than others.
Aptos, much harder to run, say much harder to run, do you know, Stargaze, et cetera,
relatively well understood at this point, been production a long time.
Do you, do you want to A, can you, A, can you run it?
B, are you going to make any money and C, can you run it for the long term?
Because that's, it's tough logistically, it's tough on a mental health perspective.
It's tough on a financial perspective because you're not going to find people to help you
or it's very difficult to find people to help you.
And you're kind of on your own.
You're a bit of a, yeah.
The Valovator Life is like, it's much more glamorous in a bull market, let's say.
At the moment, I don't know.
But then the question is, how are those teams going to make money?
I mean, back to the perennial question we ask every week on this podcast, right?
How do you make money in this industry if we knew we'd be doing it, right?
I mean, you go from chain to chain and you find opportunity to opportunity and you get
lucky in some areas and you miss some, you win some, that's it, right?
But I think it's, and then you run the ghost chains for the rest of your life.
And then you carry, you carry.
You carry so many losers with you.
You carry all these things for it because getting out of chains, I think, is the real
challenge too.
We've talked about that before.
But like, getting, and the other thing I was telling you in this city, it's not just
running the Valovator, but like, I mean, you're running it.
And even if you, you want to use a third party and those types of things, if you're going
to, if you don't know what you're doing because you're not only worrying about your piece,
but you're also carrying the tokens of others, right?
So if you're double signed, if you get slashed or something else, you're carrying the burden
of others gains or whatever.
And so if you're going to take that seriously, there's some responsibility there with that.
And I think people get into this, not thinking about that part of it, right?
Like the ability to lose value for others and what you do about that.
So yeah, I think it's, I think it's, so anyway, that was my point on the omnivorex call.
And for that group, I said, you know, I'm like, if you want to use it as a marketing,
I mean, there's a lot of marketers that are out there that use, that run validators, right?
And even Liam from Stake Cita was one of the, one of the, one of the kind of, I guess,
moderators of that call.
And I mean, Stake Cita, they're, I mean, they know what they're doing, right?
So I think, I think they've built some decent, a good team there in terms of being able to
run.
And they've had, they tombstone somewhere else, right?
Didn't they get slashed on something?
I forget, we were talking about a while back, it was like last summer or something.
They got, they got, they got, maybe not tombstone, but they got slashed on something.
No, actually, I think they got tombstone somewhere else.
It reminded me of what, what chain that was.
But it happens, it can happen, right?
And depending on the operator and, and if you want to get in this game, like you have
to be, you have to be pretty on top of it for, for like a long time.
And so I was, my advice to them was like, if you want to pay $500 a month for the ability
to have a validator on that piece and you want to use it as a marketing tool, then partner
with somebody and recognize that you're not going to make money on it and recognize that
you're going to keep it going for a very, very long time.
And I think that probably turned that person off.
Cause it wasn't, it wasn't a great thing.
So wow, yeah.
I mean, the, the point of like running it for a very, very, very long time really depends
on like,
Just kind of beyond our control, isn't it?
Well, no, yes and no.
So whether the network runs is whether or not everyone runs it or not, but whether or
not you continue there is like a decision based on, you know, you respect for your delegators,
I guess.
Yeah.
And, and so, you know, the considerations when you're shutting down is like, is there
any token value at all left?
And we'll like, what's the net effect to your delegators and how does that affect your brand
and your community?
And if, if you don't make any money, but your delegators are still making money, then, you
know, it would be a business decision on your side to turn it off.
It would be a morality decision otherwise to keep it running for, for them.
I mean, do you make an inherent commitment to just run it no matter what?
Once you start a network, I think you do.
But we have also shut down particular networks.
So we, I'm considering shutting down our T grade validated because there's a lot going
on there.
Yeah.
I thought that was your, I thought you were really up on, on T grade and the, and the possibilities
there.
Yeah.
But, so they, but they launched it and it just hasn't had any real adoption whatsoever.
So, you know, they, they've had recent things that they've said that, you know, they're
working on this and that for this year.
I'm giving it a bit longer to see how it goes.
I have to check whether we're still under contracts.
Have never made money out of it.
It's always been loser for us.
We haven't really sold any of the token or anything.
So we've been running that network for probably over maybe even two years now, at least a
year, maybe a year and a half.
But it doesn't, that particular network, it doesn't affect anyone if you finally leave
because that network's not based on delegated proof of stake.
It's, it's fee based, right?
Sorry.
Is it more fee based in terms of?
No, it's, it's, so the, is a different model that doesn't involve staking.
It's a whole different staking model and, and your, your voting weight and your, you
know, the return is, your return of the inflate inflation is based on engagement and engagement
points, which you can then have staked to your validator.
So basically if I leave, it only affects me.
Like there's no one else that have, they potentially have, is people with engagement points delegated
to my validator, but nine times out of 10, the validators are the ones with the engagement
points anyway.
So I got you.
Yeah.
I mean, you can always join later.
Like at the moment, it's just we're printing empty block after empty block.
So well, I mean, there's, I mean, that's pretty common.
Yeah.
A lot, a lot of chains, right?
So, I mean, I think, yeah, I don't know.
It's a, it's a, and the other thing is like, if you're thinking longterm is, all right,
do we have the opportunity to, like, are we going to hold off on some of these types
of things?
And we have the opportunity for it to, to be in a good position later.
But you know, I, I kind of have a little of a negative opinion towards some of those
types of things.
Things that have already peaked and you're down, you know, 90% or 95% or 98% from some
sort of all time high, it's really difficult for those to actually come back, not to that
all time high, but even, even to come back at all.
Cause there's, there's so many opportunities for somebody to fork a chain and come up with
a similar idea.
And, yeah.
And the next thing is shiny.
Again, in the next bull market, right?
Yeah.
And then the tokenomics and whatnot, like you can, you can, you can, you can, you can
you go like, okay, well, if the all time high was a dollar, right?
And I expect it to recover in three years to 20 cents, right?
You go like, well, by then the tokenomics will probably radically change, right?
So minting will be less profitable.
And then a commission, which may be between five and 10%, right?
Is going to nas X amount, right?
It's now X amount, which is let's say it probably like we're talking by the time the
bull runs, comes back around, we're probably talking another year, maybe longer.
Don't know.
Not, not financial advice.
But like on a lot of chains with kind of the early cosmos Ponziomics, you're going to see
that you'll be making like a quarter, maybe less in terms of like minting like inflation
rewards, which anyway, when the price starts going up, it's going to cause its own problems
because everybody's going to get the same idea, they're all going to run for the exit.
So the price is going to have a choppy way to get back up.
And then the other problem you're going to have is that let's say the price even does
recover, you're as validator, reliant because we don't have another economic model other
than inflation rewards, which we've talked about at length on this podcast in the past.
You know, you're making a much smaller absolute number from your previous percentage, right?
Both in terms of any tokens yourself delegating, but also in terms of anything that is delegated
to you.
So it's even like there's even less incentive.
Like if you're going to make money, probably any thing that you as a company would make
would be from your existing tokens you've already staked or compounded that that's going
to far outstrip anything that comes into your validator.
I would have thought anyway.
So there's a very weird, like, this is back again, I guess there's more a question of
tokenomics really in a lot of ways than it is about market forces, which is that there's
actually like a pretty heavy disincentive if you're a genesis validator on one of these
high inflation in the first year type chains to actually keep running your validator past
a year or two or three, because at that point you will have extracted the maximum value you
can mathematically ever extract from that chain.
So your best bet is actually to just withdraw and stake your tokens with another validator.
The only reason you might not want to do so is jurisdictional reasons or if you don't trust,
if there's not another validator you trust and to stay up.
But there are a lot of good validates that continue running.
So I know it's an interesting question.
I know Niles talked about it quite a lot, that particular question of where you're actually
getting, like, where would you?
Obviously, we're not really making money at the moment, but in the cosmos anyway, but
like, where would you be hypothetically making money for them?
Is it tokens that you've got at Genesis or near Genesis from inflation or is it future
tokens?
Almost always the former.
So the only thing I would add to that is the morality.
You're talking purely from a profitability perspective, but you also have to consider
your users.
And I think it's probably like the worst time, the worst time you could shut down your validator
is in the depth of a bear market when no one's paying attention because then, you know, they
might have picked your brand because they trust you and then you shut down your validator
while no one's paying attention and you're down bad.
But then, you know, they come back when the enthusiasm returns to the market and find
that they haven't received rewards for the last six months because they fucking, you
know, you fucked them.
So right.
There's no one's watching.
I don't know.
Like, you know, things like Juno, Stargaze, even Chihuahua, like during the bull market
and when they launched, you know, I feel like we did well enough out of those and took profits
off the table enough that we can at least give them a chance for a long time.
You know, I kind of have a bit of a limit to where I'm willing to see things go.
And my limit is if my TVL gets below like 10 grand, yeah, that when I'm sort of looking
at turning it off, like we're not making money after at the inflation rates at the moment,
like, you know, a lot of them are sort of between say seven and 30%.
And if there's a TVL below like 200,000, you're already not making money.
Right.
That's five percent.
We probably haven't been making money for a while.
That's five percent.
Yeah.
At five percent.
And, you know, we won't go over five percent for the most part.
So like all of our validators are five percent.
That's also a decision, right?
To say to say at 200,000 at five percent, that's my that's my limit.
And I would rather leave the chain than up than increase my commission.
Yeah.
So let me quick math this.
So safe.
We've got 200,000 and there's give it a generous amount.
15% of inflation.
Yeah.
This is an accounting for like dilution and it fucking going down five percent of that
1500 bucks a year, 125 bucks a month.
That's actually probably at what at what at what dollar amount.
So that's just taking the TVL.
So if you're yeah, if you're validator has 200 grand and then the inflation on that,
assuming that the price is static inflation or 15% gives you X and then you take five
percent.
It's about 1500 bucks for a year.
That's not worth the cost of the.
That doesn't cover an hour of my time.
Like no, yeah, it doesn't.
Yeah.
But again, if it's if it's a low hour, you bill $1500 an hour.
I'm not on a monthly basis.
Yeah.
25 bucks a month.
I definitely bill more than 125 bucks.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I think that's that's a good that's a good actually set of math.
And then I think you make a decision from there whether or not it's is this what's the
propensity for growth and what's the value of the chain?
Do we think it's undervalued or is it overvalued?
Right.
And those types of things.
I think you're based on that.
Let let.
Well, it's to be fair for just to cut in again.
Sorry, no, but like your your math just there where you're like, oh, actually, no, 125 dollars
an hour.
Like that's another one of those numbers that sounds like a lot on paper.
And then if you've ever had to try if you've ever had to pay a freelance infrastructure
engineer and because you're doing Kanga Bucks as well on you.
No, that's not.
Okay.
Yeah.
USD.
There's I would think a slim chance you can get a decent infra person for 125 dollars
an hour, much less one who understands the cosmos.
Yeah.
But you have to pay that person for fucking 40 hours a week.
Yeah.
That's what I mean.
That's why even if you could you can't and even if you could it would be more than that.
And so like your math is if anything like on the face of it, you're like 125 dollars
an hour sounds high.
It's like, no, if anything, that's actually pretty low.
That's actually well, it's also for one hour.
So it's not like it's not 125 times 160 a month.
It's it's we do the taxes slash accountancy discussion.
I can nothing.
It's the not worth it.
It's six months into the year now.
I pretty much was it's just coming up to it.
So I was doing our running accounting.
I was trying to work out where like it's really interesting, I guess I was observing like just
how those small incremental costs that you just go, oh, that's cost of running the business.
We have to do it.
Servers AWS, whatever it might be.
Yeah.
How quickly that stuff adds up.
Holy shit.
Like I canceled.
I think I canceled seven bare metal machines this week because I've been I was just on a
I was trying to work.
Well, I was I was on a well, this this this makes sense.
Let's do this.
And then I was doing things.
Well, this is going to expire in November.
I might as well just do it now and bring up a separate one.
And this is a better deal.
And I'm trying to change providers on some shit and like all these types of things.
And I realized that like that I have a, you know, $12,000 a month infrastructure cost.
And I'm looking at this going, what the fuck is going on?
Like where the hell did this come from?
And I'm just not being smart about it, right?
Because you get in that situation where where you're making decisions based off of long
term, but you look short term and you realize that like, what the hell is this?
Right.
But yeah, it's very easy.
Those little things like, hey, this, the servers on a discount in this area, it's only 200 bucks
a month in Singapore, which is a really cheap thing.
You're like, I'll get two because I could use them.
And then you realize, oh, shit, that's 400 bucks a month, like another $400 a month.
Right.
Yeah.
Or any network where you always have to run a test net, like you sometimes forget again.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
And I mean, I don't obviously, I know I bag on about it, but like it one of the big
things that we've moved off, you know, in the last three, four months was running a very
large AWS rig for Aptos.
And we had to run that for a test net as well.
So that was, that's one thing that because our cost basis for that has changed.
Like you said, short term and long term, like when you're like long term, we need to be
up.
Like as long as it's, we know that above this dollar value, it's profitable.
So you may as well do it.
Don't worry about the cost basis too much.
And then you like, when you change that and you see how it changes the numbers, you're
like, well, yes and no.
Yes and no.
Right.
You know, yes, you're still making money.
But when you aggregate like, whatever it is, like a 5k difference, four months after
your company has 20 grand more in the bank.
And you're like, oh, that's potentially the difference between seeing out another X months,
you know, when, if and when this ends or changes or whatever, that's runway.
Right.
And that's a huge difference.
Like, and you just, yeah, like you say, with your running around killing a service off,
like you multiply that by a bunch of stuff and it is really surprising.
But you know, like the second you've done it, right, you're just going to, as a business
go out the next day and start accruing more of those costs again.
No.
No, never again.
If I could know.
So let me hit you with some more quick math, right?
Just back on profitability.
So let's say, for example, I run 13 networks at the moment, right?
I conservatively run networks.
I don't just jump on them all.
So I resemble that a murder mark.
Yeah.
I'm middle of the road, to be honest.
So I have 13.
There is four networks that have a TVL above 200,000.
But let's make a assumption that they all have a TVL of 200,000, right?
Which they don't.
So say we're making 125 bucks per validator.
That's 1625 bucks a month, right?
My U.S.D.
This is all U.S.D.
Okay.
My infrastructure cost is probably $10 an hour.
Plus my infrastructure cost is five and a half grand a month.
So it's a loss of $4 grand a month.
I was looking at my TVL because I've been using behind the scenes.
So this is kind of embarrassing to admit, to be honest.
But I'm turning into a little of a Zabix person.
You use it once and you're hooked.
Oh, fucking.
Well, we use Grafana per meters for everything, right?
And we use Grafana very heavily for trending and analysis and other types of things, which
is really good.
I know what thing it gets those tools.
I love it.
And I love the timeline-based stuff and all that stuff.
But for server-meat management, I want to know the distempts.
And I want to be able to get alerts based off of things dropping out of H&A proxy.
To write each of those in Grafana and the alerting there is a bit of a pain in the ass.
And it's kind of shit.
And so Null is part of his, can I say this?
Is that okay?
That part of his holiday, a couple of us jumped in to be able to monitor some of King Node's
infrastructure to make sure that if something exploded while he was gone, which nothing
did because why would it?
But if something exploded while he was gone, there was at least another eye on it because
he's going to be out of pocket.
It's fair, right?
And we'll just step in like last minute to say this whatever.
And the signing infrastructure was separate, we were talking about nodes to be able to,
you know, last minute upgrade, something happens, blah, blah, blah.
Like what we talked about before is a 24-7 job, right?
It's pain in the fucking ass.
And so you can't go on a walkabout in the middle of an island in the winter for some
reason.
For a week.
For a week, you literally cannot do that and be 100% disconnected without some help.
Like it's impossible to do.
Like I have a go bag that goes with me everywhere because I got a fucking just in case, right?
Everybody, the holiday is carried go bags.
Anyway, so I'm watching all of Null's Zabax infrastructure and I was like, all right,
some of this is pretty cool.
Like some of it's very 1980s, like in terms of management, but some of that you need.
Like I want to be able to look at distempts and I want to be able to look at smart information
and I want to be able to, those types of things.
And so I'm looking at one of his structures here, which is a TVL piece and I'm recognizing
that I think I have one Cosmos chain that's above your number.
Like, why am I an Evamos?
I'm a number 100.
My TVL says $2,800 on this dashboard.
What the fuck am I doing in that chain?
That chain is a pain in the ass.
Oh, is this you pulled in my template?
Yeah.
Like why the fuck am I in this?
Like what am I doing with this chain?
Like it's not going anywhere.
Like it's missing like crazy.
I just had a like, there's no, you can't state sync it.
There's a 300 gig snapshot.
Like it's just losing money every month.
Like what am I doing with this thing?
And it fucking destroys drives too.
It does.
There's a couple of networks in here that just fucking destroy drives.
I had actually, I had to cancel that drive because both drives had a 200% on the utilization
number and they're both overheating like crazy.
It was a fucking mess of literally zero transaction blocks.
Someone running a website can have that server now.
Fuck them.
Yeah, they're gonna get it.
They're gonna look at what the hell this is going to be like in 2014 when probably
the last time I ran any bare metal like turn off the last box in 2014 and it was after
I think 2013 was where we had some drive failures on stuff that I was like, I've just brought
up these bare metal rack stuff literally just ordered them from the provider Bitcoin minus
that was it.
I bet I was getting fucking sure it was.
Yeah.
It was just DJs, but just a different generation of DJs and I'm just there trying to run some
data pipelines for the government.
It's like, well, everything's fucking failing.
The hard drives are failing, the fucking things going down and we need to run the website
on a different box.
It won't run.
What is this?
I don't want to enjoy some of this stuff.
We have like time traveled in the validated stack.
We have like multiple levels of redundancy right?
And when my drives get the nuke stage, I just let them eat until they go, but I haven't
lost the drive yet and some of them have gotten pretty fucking bad.
So I just want also I want to get rid of this server, I had another one that was like kind
of had some room.
I was like, I want to get rid of this thing.
I guess I want to get the cost out of it too.
Like I think I was spending $200 a month on it most or something.
Like what am I doing?
Yeah, what we run a so our free Evmos RPC just gets beat the fuck up as well.
I don't know what people are doing with that thing, but it gets beat up and it like resets
a lot.
I don't know why.
I mean, I don't care because it's a free RPC.
Would it be like it like the like the service reboots?
Yeah, the service reboots.
Because you know, you would have seen like from my monitoring there, you get like a restart
alone.
Yeah.
So usually get a restart and then kind of catching up alert in like early in the morning.
Yeah, but it doesn't.
I turn that off to come through to page duty.
Yeah, who cares?
Right.
Yeah.
It's like page duty is like send everything except free RPC.
It's free baby.
Deal with it.
Hey, so let's let's let's have a topic swing.
Hey, yeah, enough about that.
Our two our two viewers are here for the news.
So thanks, Rama again for the news topics for the week.
I know you've been chomping at the bit waiting for us to get to them and stop talking about
stupid validators.
Shit.
Before we get to the news, I was born in the chat.
Name the classic meme for those of you listening later on podcast players.
You're gonna have to go to YouTube to participate in this particular game.
So name the classic meme and about to throw up an emoji.
Oh, sorry.
Was that old website that used to send people when you didn't like them?
All right.
Yeah.
I can't.
I don't remember.
Don't name it because then other people can't play along.
No, if you got it, it was an awful it was an awful thing.
Is it still around?
It must be still around.
Oh, yeah.
Is it?
So I can mirror it's different different website.
Where did that come from?
Why?
Did you just randomly think of that?
You're like, I have a donut.
I quite see defy anyway.
So we'll come back to that later.
Yeah.
It's now time for the drill of the week.
Oh, yeah.
What was that?
Not the answer in the right answer.
So no, is your turn this week?
Say when?
Nope, that is not the answer.
That is the other one.
I was thinking of when, when, when, when, when, when you are in the middle, you're in
the section, I know that's where a toilet.
Perfect.
The left page or right page, right hand page middle, middle, the third one, the third one.
Okay.
The toilet feeler ruins another public restroom with his grubby hands.
The toilet feeler.
Is that an implement?
Maybe it's a person.
I think it's a person because he has grubby hands apparently.
Why do they have grubby hands?
Who's a toilet feeling?
Toilets, I suppose.
That's just simply in the Stray Joe pile.
Love it.
Yeah.
Did I ever send you that, that video where it's like from the drill book?
Like, I come up with the second drill book where it's like Mr. Awesome King of the Universe
or whatever it's called.
Somebody's got the AI M&M to read out one of the stories from the book.
It's fucking great because they've just put the, they've just got the AI M&M to read it
out and they've just kind of loosely put it on the grid of, I think it might be on the
real Slim Shady.
Because some of the one-liners are so stupid, it just sort of has this brilliant elegance
to it where it's just like this man saw that I was not to be fucking taken seriously and
stuff but it's like an M&M's voice.
It's just, I try and find the link for the YouTube.
Anyway, so, no, you can go back to the news now.
I'm sorry for interrupting you.
I mean, it is like the seventh time you've interrupted me.
I didn't feel like you're sorry at all.
If it makes you feel better, one day.
They regrets.
When Rama was on last week, we interrupted the shit out of him too.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, we did.
Yeah, yeah.
Had it wrong ago.
He's like one of three listening now.
Yeah, he's not really, he doesn't really take care of plants at all, but other than
that, like it was a pretty good episode.
He doesn't take care of what?
His plants are all dead.
Oh, right.
Behind him, it's all like just empty flower pots everywhere.
He does, however, take exceptional care of.
He's a little one.
We talked about that.
We did talk.
I can tell you the close to the show.
But he did, we did talk about that.
I think only part of the law, actually, I think we determined it was only like the front.
If you're just in it, representing, you don't have to care about the fucking back.
Yeah, you fucked the back.
I agree.
Doesn't matter.
You got to cut the checker pattern and everything in the front lawn.
Like I've seen photos of it.
It'll give you like a dad job for sure.
That's what he said.
He didn't show us.
Well, he was going to actually walk around the house, but then I think we got distracted
by reading the news.
But please go ahead.
Oh, you made Rama read the news last night?
Yeah, that's why we had him on because we don't want to, because we don't understand
any of it.
So that was kind of the idea.
That's why he said good luck on this one because honestly, this news item, this isn't
the second one here, that row number three.
I read it four times.
I have no idea what the fuck he's talking about.
It was like us.
It was a sepcus type of situation where I had no idea.
The first one is a good one though.
You should read that one.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, here we go.
In Rama's words, sad day for Cosmos as its largest public commons chain, Kanto, announces
its migrating to a polygon valideum.
Not surprisingly, the token pumps 13% on the announcement they're leaving Cosmos.
Is this one of the, I mean, we've had a lot of chains that have been migrating to Tenor
Mint, right?
Like DYDX and we've had all these different types of things that are moving towards this
tool set.
Is this one of the first ones that's moving away?
I can't think of any other ones that have been really migrating away from Tenor Mint.
I think some NFT projects have, but not necessarily chains.
But L ones as it was.
Yeah.
I mean, I assume this is, I didn't really, I didn't read much about this.
I assume this is investment based.
Like, is it technology based or is it like somebody rolled up and said, hey, we want
this, we want this project.
So therefore we're going to back up.
I would suspect that their token is not going great.
And I would suspect that they have inferred that that is due to the ecosystem, not because
they've got a network with a shit token.
So this is, and Romer says, this is the first chain they're leaving because Evmo's close
source licensed their product.
I do remember this being pretty much like a fork out of Evmo.
So that means that this team is now responsible for basically rebuilding Kanto as an EVM compatible
chain on Polygon.
Or maybe they're for which is already an EVM L2.
Right.
Well, presumably they're just basically going to fucking either fork or launch on that.
Well, it's just a contract thing.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Well, it'll be an L2.
So it is a chain, but it's a chain that then talks, that then rolls the transactions back
up.
Right.
So they are presumably going to run that chain just so they can tell everybody to redeploy
their smart contracts.
Or I guess they'll work out a way of translating the state into a Genesis state and then just
start the party up again on a chain.
Kanto is just a general purpose EVM chain.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
So they're just looking for an EVM basically.
They're looking for a token they control on a thing that's making blocks that is EVM.
So both of them need to make sense.
So both Rama and Ryan Sean Adams said the largest public commons chain from Cosmos.
Do you know what that definition means?
What is a public commons chain?
That means that that's what is at the top of their website and it's what they put in
the email when they email people and nobody has fact checked that Kanto is a shit chain.
How is it a public comm...
Wouldn't Juno be the largest public commons chain?
Juno would be the only public commons chain because it actually doesn't have an ownership
structure around it or a foundation.
Rama says I stole Ryan's words for the meme.
See, that's why...
I'm actually here.
It's a very large public commons chain.
It's really not the largest public commons chain in the Cosmos, right?
There's a...
I'd say it's a very common chain, maybe.
$200 million of Juno lost TVL would disagree about the idea that that is the largest public
commons chain.
Is there a chain even public commons if it hasn't had a full fucking...
Plus you forked it.
How do you fork...
Yeah, if you haven't had a proletarian uprising, even a commons chain, bro.
We've had an entire political cycle of destruction, like actual politics.
If you haven't had a smart contract to remove funds from a maybe exchange, maybe whale stealing
airdrop wallet, then is it really a public commons chain?
This is Juno.
I'm just trying to figure out what a fucking proletarian is.
I'm going to be starting to write next month, you said, but so...
You just need to come up with a...
I just need a pithy title.
I'll work on it.
Hey, your thesis...
We're going to work out together.
Your thesis says I'm reading ahead to the next items.
I'm not doing that.
I'm still trying to figure out what a volidium is.
It's not it.
So it looks like...
I don't know.
I shouldn't have gone down there.
Like the first thing I come across is like Polygon wants to go ZK and they're transitioning
the chain to ZK EVM volidium.
I'm just going to back out and read the next...
Reverse, reverse, reverse.
I'm going to get the brakes on that shit.
Well, Adios can't tell.
I guess...
Did EVMOS start go up because now that...
No, still down 6% today.
Never mind.
EVMOS is in a firm downward trend, I would say.
It actually had a little bit of a pump this week or last week.
I think it was...
I think everything fucked the trend a little bit this week.
Yeah, Juno too, right?
Don't let them do it.
Folks excited that Juno went up 60% from 1 cent per stop this week.
1.5 cents.
Now it's 1.9.
Heal.
No, 19 cents.
Heal.
19 cents.
Heal.
It's $44.
That's okay.
Heal it.
So I did a little bit of quick math before as you guys were talking about something completely
fucking useless.
And for Juno to ATH again at $40, it would be about a market cap of $4.5 billion.
That should be fine.
Which is like a top 20 fucking change.
So that's the problem.
What you're saying, could you do the same math for Stargaze, please?
Because these two questions, I think, would determine whether or not we are on bond.
Hold on.
Stargaze.
$0.50 was it?
$0.50?
Yes.
$0.50?
It hit $0.52 for a day or something like that.
But I think I thought the real estate all the time high was like $0.45 or $0.44.
We sold a bit of Stargaze at $0.50.
Did you?
Yeah.
I held that in my hands.
We sold more.
I was holding on for $1.
That was my thing.
I was like, I'm selling all that stuff.
I thought I was going to get $1.
You know, it just goes to show what I fucking did.
I was like, whoa, let's sell a bit.
I was like, let's sell a bit.
Cover our AWS bill for the first few months.
But I think this has got runway.
And then it starts to go down and I was just like, maybe we should sell a bit more because
there's AWS bill that gets smaller.
Maybe a little bit more.
Maybe a bit more.
Maybe we're the reason it's going down.
I remember the phrase talking with you while I was getting a coffee on a Saturday morning
about the half a million dollar airdrop problem that we had with the accountant.
Which is no longer a problem.
Well, yeah, the problem was it was all vested.
So we weren't going to get it for whatever it was, X years.
It was like, fuck, if we have to pay today's value, it's like half a million dollars.
But what's it going to be worth in five years?
It's like, well, it could be worth millions of dollars.
It's like narrator.
It was going to be worth.
It was not.
I guess it would be worth about $1,000 now.
I don't even want to think about what we paid on that in tax.
Best not to.
You went some?
It seems to be mainly the thing I've learned from going back through the books as I did
them this week was the paper value.
No, I've said that before.
The paper value versus what's in the bank account at any given time in crypto is a widely
divergent story.
Like if the government ever came knocking and went, says that you've got four million
dollars in assets, you'd be like, yes, which of our many shitcoins would you like?
You can have a mole.
Stargate would be about $1.2 billion at ATH again.
Yeah.
That thing with the shitcoin is that like, yeah, they're like, oh, you've got all this
money and they're like, if you can sell it, you're going to have it.
That's just it.
I was trying.
Okay.
Hang on a second.
Before I say this, I need to just...
So I was talking to our accountants about this and I was like, well, hang on, doesn't
liquidity come into it, right?
Because there's no way we can actually sell any of this stuff.
Even in this market, absolutely not.
But even in the bull market, it will be really hard now in the cosmos to shift any serious
number of tokens.
Even the majority of positions where we have vested or compounded or anything like that,
it's just like absolute fantasy to think that some of those tokens are going to get
back to, especially some of the shitcoins that ended up at like $5, $10 or something
like that.
You're like, really?
But hey, that's how it works anyway.
So that's how it works.
There is apparently a stress test going on at the moment on one of my tests.
Secret chain number five.
Yeah.
Secret experiment number five.
Secret experiment.
Our other stress test, I think I canceled actually when we were getting prepped for.
Everyone's like, ah, we're losing all the blocks on the chain that makes money.
It's not that bad.
Keeps us to maybe...
Yeah, we realized that the other day, I was just like, oh, it's nearly time to do the
really, really stressful thing where we all have to commission a bunch of servers and
fuck around for four weeks.
I was literally, I was researching for like three weeks on some fat daddy fucking bare
metal, which I found a couple and then had some help in finding some other ones and had
a plan for it something month to month.
And I'm looking at those big old Epic 73, 73, 93, 74 EPs and 95, 74 EPs, which are basically
like two or three AMD 7950s like joined together with like a terabyte of RAM.
Yeah, maybe.
This big dog type of things.
Just for the hell of it.
And that's about what I realized.
It's just all PCI five and like just badass, like really fast things to really...
For no reason, right?
Like for no reason, for absolutely no...
The thing is, you look at that, like in the last one of those stress tests, right, we
spent in one month, we spent something like $16,000.
We spent a huge amount on one rig on AWS to do that because we had to push the hardware
requirements way up.
It might even been more than $16,000.
Mistake.
So for this one, literally, I was trying to work out what to do and I was like, oh, we're
going to have to do like a benchmarking, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then I went to our provider and looked through their bare metal catalog and went
from the box that we're currently using for mainnet and then looked up a generation and
then looked up the spec sheet and went, that one's four times as expensive.
That would do.
That'll be fine.
No problem.
It'll be fine because it's bare metal, it's going to be ready for one month.
It doesn't matter how much you've crashed the hard drive.
Bring it up, set it down.
Turn that bad boy off.
That's it.
Tending everything.
And then saying, thank you very much.
12 drives and read zero.
So, sir, I've been talking, well, I've actually mentioned to you that I'm looking at building
some servers at the moment, right?
Yes.
And they're going to be Epic servers.
And EPIC, EPYC.
Or both.
Really?
Right?
They'll be Epic as well.
9004 series chips.
And the drives I've been looking at for those, because this one needs quite a bit of NVME
storage.
Yes.
And those 15 terabyte drives have a million IOPS, which is...
They have a million IOPS?
A million IOPS.
Is that like, what is that?
Like the speed of light on every single fucking thing?
That is, you can write the whole drive and unwrite the whole drive real quick.
Like just as many times as you want.
How much is one of those drives?
A few grand.
Is it really a million IOPS?
A million IOPS.
Hey, and then when that chain goes to zero, you can have a really fucking clock.
Your game might be really fast drives.
Play Counter Strike at like a million FPS.
Hey, I was talking the other day about how it'd be kind of cool to get back into, what's
the online first person she is.
I've got a game back right there.
Yeah, I still do some shit.
So let's do some quick calc.
What?
The most expensive thing in this server is drive drive.
So if I get 15 of the 15 terabyte drives.
15 of the 15 terabyte drives.
Sorry, 12 of the...
Holy shit.
Oh, sorry, 15 is too many, but 12, that's a reasonable number.
So that's a lot of money.
I guess that's about, I guess, it's 18 grand a drive.
So the server is going to be about 20 grand right?
So at $125 a month, it'd only take 160 months for a...
To recoup the cost of one of those drives or all those drives?
One of those of the server to recoup the cost of the server at the current tick of a 200K
TVL.
So really, if I can summarize the last hour, Nile has spent an hour very vigorously and
morally stably defending the position of why you need to keep a server on to basically
present an hour of conclusions that suggest you should be turning off every validator
that you currently run not shopping for $20,000 service.
I do think that your idea of being able to move validators to the down under, that idea
is a cool idea and there's not a lot of infrastructure that's run out of Australia.
And I think in the grand scheme of things, it will make you absolutely nothing more and
will probably make you lose more.
It'll definitely make me lose more money.
I think people love to talk that game and we have other partners who...
And you have chains who really want to push towards decentralization.
They want these nodes in Central Africa or they want it in South America or they want
it in Central America or they want it in Australia.
Difficult places to be able to host because of either infrastructure or just the speed
of light.
And I think those gains probably are less than the cost associated with those, unfortunately.
So to match the bandwidth of all of my current dedicated bare metal, at an Australian data
center would cost me about fucking eight grand a month.
They have to run new fiber just for you.
Like, well, no, we're gonna have to run a boat and drop this piece of glass.
Double the fucking subterranean bandwidth.
40% is going to Kig nodes and the other percent is going to Team Station.
Okay.
I'm not gonna advocate for AWS.
We've been there, we've done that, I was wrong, whatever.
Let's move on.
Well, we still run AWS for some stuff to be fair.
Actually, for things like signers, really good idea still.
Anyway, I would run AWS if I could figure it out at all.
We run one signer.
We run one signer at AWS too.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I think it's redundant.
Somebody else is standing up all night watching that shit, right?
Exactly.
I think if Cosmos were making more money, we'd basically complete our move from, like, TMK
has worked for us, so whatever, man.
But I think in a super ideal Cosmos is absolutely smashing it set up, we'd finish our migration
to, we've played around with Horcrux but never migrated to it fully.
We just have three signers in different AWS regions, maybe one in GCP, YOLO, and then
just never worry about it again, right?
Just bring out the odd one, bin the odd one, just on a rolling basis, right?
But there's a big gap of options, the gulf of different options between fully AWS and
this insanity that Niles talking about with having to run your own undecided cables, and
I know a bit of exaggeration, but even so, like, the reason that this whole business
is difficult is because you can't ever plan as a business your income, right?
You have no idea what you'll be making in a month, two months, three months, six months,
a year, right?
And we've all had the thing where people try to market their chain to you, right, as a
validator that has some notion of professionalism around them or some whatever it is that means
that people sometimes will approach you and be like, we're interested in you guys being
part of our genesis.
You know, all of that marketing and everything, like you get that as a validator too, where
everybody is, especially at the moment, to a certain extent for a lot of chains, like
it's shilling them to you, right?
But in amongst all of this, like, there's this question of like, well, yeah, back to
I get Nile, you know, you've got an ongoing, you know, never turn off, especially not in
a bear market.
So you can just ignore this bit because you obviously hate making money.
So there's a question of like, well, you should probably actually optimize for infrastructure
providers and infrastructure and build your entire stack as a business in such a way that,
look, if you do find that everything does actually pretty much go to zero, and you really are
like, it ain't getting up lads that you can on a three month time scale, sort of reduce
your infrastructure costs and your core business costs as close to zero yourself as possible,
apart from, you know, totally fixed costs.
I don't know if you have like phone contracts and offices and stuff, you know, that kind
of normal stuff, right?
But that's the big attraction, I think, always was for us to a certain extent for AWS was
like, well, look, if everything does prove to be very, very ephemeral, well, we're not
sitting here, right, right.
I mean, in America, you can write down the servers in a different way.
So it's very tax and advantage, right?
But you can't.
I don't want to be sitting around, I mean, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody.
Where we're going back to doing more traditional corporate consulting, and we're just got loads
of loads of tin sitting around that we're having to do asset reconciliation or we'll
be like, this tin is useless to us.
What the fuck?
Well, you really need to be making money to be able to write something.
I was going to say, you don't run a business.
You really don't run a business based off of like, I've said this past, you know, you
try not to run a business based off of tax consequences associated to losses.
Like, like that's not really the way it's more carrying forward losses than what is
getting a tax write off.
So I write down the cost of servers.
Yeah, but writing them down is a cost.
I mean, the depreciation is against your balance sheet.
But if your balance sheet is already negative, it just makes it more negative.
It doesn't fuck it.
It doesn't matter.
Yeah, you have to make money and then you can write it.
Yeah.
Well, because we're a business, we still actually astonishingly do make money.
But you know, honestly, to that point, like we used to run, like I used to have like 12
month contracts at a bunch of different agreements for servers and things like that.
And all those are month, month to month.
Like I'm trying to get, I'm even willing to pay more month to month just to try to get
out of long term contracts because you have no, without that visibility and without any
sort of before when we had like some sign, we had growth and you had like, at least
things were moving at a decent positive.
If you look, if you step back, right, it was obviously ups and downs, but you had like
at least a general growth aspect of things you would say, this is willing to, I'm willing
to take a 20% discount on this, the set of this infrastructure because of this, because
of the contract, but I'm away from all that.
It's all now, everything, everything can go away tomorrow and I'm willing for it to
go away tomorrow.
So just, just for the listeners though, we're not crying poor, all of us here run at a profit,
probably not from validating, but you know, we're not going to go away tomorrow.
So don't be worried about that.
The listener.
Well, I think it's that thing of like, you're all, a lot of what you have to do in any market
or any kind of field is to find, you do a thing initially, right?
To learn the market and to network and meet people and, you know, get your feet under
the table and then eventually you find out what your actual value add is or the thing
people actually need and you do that instead.
And yeah, to some extent, I think, yeah, less so now because I think for us that certainly
became smart contract engineering, which unfortunately now is not, there's nothing really that's profitable
about that for us and the way we operate, which is a bit of a shame.
And so we're in a bit of an impasse with that, I suppose, where I've been at whatever.
But for other people, the example would be getting to validating sell RPCs, right, which
can be pretty profitable if you have people who want to pay for that.
Well, it's another thing you can do.
That's you learn validation network markets of different people, run institutional nodes.
That's a perfectly valid different market strategy, I suppose.
The King blockchain PTYLTD, we supplement our validate losses by selling feet picks
on only fans.
I hope of your significant other.
We found our value in our product markets.
Validatorfeatpicks.com.
Actually, what?
Yeah.
We've done all right with RPC nodes and other types of things.
But even that, I don't consider that a revenue that keeps the lights on.
It's not revenue that I think is, it's not life changing revenue in any sort of way.
And it's not even a revenue that I would look at like an executive type role and say, this
is worth it.
That's not worth it.
Let me rephrase that.
It's not an executive type of role where you would say, it's a crazy amount of revenue
that makes it a slam dunk.
It's still like anything else.
And even with some of those types of projects, like we talked about Validator, some of the
stress associated RPC is even higher because you are providing a service that really can
have very little or zero downtime.
So Validator can miss blocks.
It's not the end of the world.
There's redundancy built in this network.
RPC is going down that chain is like depending on what that RPC is used for and the importance
of that and kind of the project, that chain is dead.
And that means that that's a user experience issue.
That means people get frustrated with that.
And that has a lot, honestly, has a lot more impact, I think, than a single Validator missing
blocks like Google's this shit.
And so some of the stress associated to that, like I feel more stress from the RPC side than
doing the Validator side.
There's no doubt about it.
Yeah, you don't want to let your customers down.
Fuck no.
Let's, let's, let's, and Ram is getting upset and I don't want to lose him.
So he works for us.
Yeah.
I feel like we work for him now.
This is another one of those.
Actually, have we paid him yet?
Somebody more than they need you.
We haven't really paid him yet.
Yeah, I know.
I don't really mean to be like he spends time writing this stuff.
That's a partnership.
Yeah, it's a partnership.
Yeah, no, I agree.
Okay.
He feels like I can feel the vibe in the room.
That's what that emoji was earlier.
Is he DM?
He's not the ring of partnership.
So I'm going to start shit, you asshole.
I'm going to go all the way to the bottom to something that I can actually fucking understand
more than what the other two are.
The other one is an idea.
So CircleRug's noble by launching their native stable coin issuance on a polka dot parachain
asset hub, which can be transferred to other parachains via its XCM protocol.
I don't see how that's a total rug.
Isn't that a different ecosystem?
I thought so too.
Yeah, I read that.
That's one you didn't understand.
That was the one I didn't understand.
Injective announces the launch of in EVM, hoping to tap into eq liquidity and developers
by enabling them to deploy applications on injective rollups.
This will enable ETH, the Cosmos Composability via IBC.
Isn't that composable?
I don't know.
Is it?
I know.
Well, composable is polka dot.
I don't know.
I just want to observe that.
I don't think we have it on anymore, but the Rainier Wolf Castle, that's the joke.
The thing with the CircleRug's Noble, isn't it a different ecosystem?
That's the joke.
It's a joke.
Something else that happened in injective this week that I, you know, is another talking
point.
So they have a government's proposal at the moment.
Okay, let me start, they have a trade and earn program, right?
And it's like something to do with, you know, you do some trading, you earn points, and
then you get like, you know, rewarded based on the amount of points you accrue over the
month.
And then there are some wallets that are just like wash trading with each other to accrue
all the points and then get paid the rewards.
Which when you read that there's a program to incentivize trading, you would assume that
that's exactly what people are going to do.
It's just Steve.
It's all Steve.
But anyway, there's a proposal out to nullify the points on those addresses, which I found
quite interesting.
Anyway, so this number two, have you like, does it make any sense to you at all?
No, I read it a fucking lot in here at times.
I read this.
I can read it.
I can go for this one.
Good.
Do you get it?
Eclipse FND announces they've managed to get the power ranges together and have morphed
into Dino Megazord, utilizing as much of the crypto technology as possible to ensure it
is as hard as possible to build.
So they're using Ether's settlement layer, execution via Solana's VM, Celestia for data
availability, whatever the fuck that means, and risk ZK proofs.
And additionally, for all to the Spaniard winner, Sepkus will be marketing, will be
the spokesperson for the protocol because winners use Eclipse FND.
That's going to be there.
So I feel like this is the one.
The question, sorry, but I think you're having is, am I a winner?
You feel insecure about whether or not you can even use Eclipse FND.
No matter what it is, that's not important.
You want to be a part of this.
You're already sold, but you're like, am I cool enough?
Am I a winner?
And no, you need to go into the bathroom, look into the mirror and say, I am a winner.
And then immediately get your credit out and go and buy some fucking tokens as shit as
it is.
And then you're going to take a video of what you just said and take it into the mirror
and you telling me that I'm a winner.
It feels more like endearing.
Now this Eclipse FND sounds to me like somebody sitting in the back.
No, you know this.
What's the, what's the, we're already winners of this podcast.
What's the line for Wolf of Wall Street?
I don't ask you to judge me on my winners.
I ask you to judge me on my losers because there are so few.
My account is wish that was true of our fucking business strategy.
I just saw a few of them.
So Eclipse FND seems to me like one guy sitting in a very large warehouse on a seat in the
middle of said warehouse, making like one of those quilted fucking blankets, like sewing
it together with all the little squares of pictures of houses and shit.
Hey, a quilt you mean?
Like a quilt blanket also does a quilt.
Like a quilt.
You know, a quilt could just be like a big piece of fabric, right?
I'm talking about the little square ones where they take like a little square of a house
and a little square of a dog and a little square of a fucking garden.
And then they sew it all together and that's your life.
I think that is a definition of a quilt.
Yeah, a quilt.
Yeah.
They're quilting.
Eclipse FND.
I think quilt might be combined actually by the, by the shape, by the triangle.
Cause if you buy one from a shop, right, it obviously doesn't have like your grandma's
sewn in a bunch of stuff to it.
But it still has those triangular pockets, doesn't it?
Not triangular square.
They're fucking squares on there.
They just on there too.
What the fuck?
What is this?
What does this shape?
What does it look like?
It looks like that.
This is, this is going to be in six months time when I have my, my, my transition Viva.
They're going to be like, final question.
Good, good job on the cryptography.
What is this?
We're wearing our quilt this morning when we were just thinking about getting up and
coming into the, doing your Viva.
We were like, let's just ask somebody who should know about that.
It's a, it's a fucking, it's a rhombus.
It's a rhombus.
I remember this from the Eclipse FND fucking white paper.
It's a two dimensional Tesseract.
It's a rhombus.
It is actually a two dimensional Tesseract.
Well, that's true.
I read this X, Y, Z.
Three men, David, says not, not all quilts are patchwork.
The CEO's right.
Is that true?
Anyway, I read this.
The thing is like the squares put all together.
That's quilt.
I think that's a quilt.
All right.
I did read this.
I did really have to be like a fucking scrapbook is what I'm saying.
I did read this, this tweet and also the follow on mirror.xyz long 25 page kind of poster on
this.
And I, it was so fucking degen.
I felt like I need to take a shower after reading this.
Like it was, it was.
Can you, can you believe that we're up to episode 80 of this shit?
What are we going to do episode 100?
That's the big question.
Shut it down.
Turn it around.
Go on to 99.
Straight to the end.
Straight to the zero.
Straight in the wooden crate.
Straight to the end of the house.
We should.
At what point do we start to hit like that parabolic curve like followers and shit?
Because they say like your first couple of years, you know, your first year you have like,
you know, 10 viewers and your second year you have like 20 viewers and your fourth year
you've got like 7 million viewers.
When do we get the 7 million?
Is that the fourth year?
I think you have to hit the algorithm which requires not getting demonetized every single
episode or swearing or any of the other many things that we do like fucking constantly.
Fuck man.
I don't know about any of that shit.
That is like, that sounds technical.
Sorry.
We were talking about the news.
We just had a comment about winners from Ben Davis saying, did Coos really win when his
teammates gifted it to him?
Well, Ben, if his teammates gifted it to him, then A, they would have, well, they, well,
they, look, he opened the gap.
He opened the gap.
They didn't open the gap to take red and he held red.
Whether or not Jonas Vingard could have taken the red off him is another question.
I don't know.
I don't think, I don't think, I think gifted would be a bit strong anyway.
I honestly do not know what in the fuck you're talking about.
Is this football again?
Football.
I went to an Aussie rules game once.
It was totally baffling and I was like, this is what happens when you just let a bunch
of lads in the sunshine with beer just do their own thing.
And then I looked it up and the rules for Aussie football have been standardized for longer
than the rules of like association football.
And I was like, what?
My, I am shooketh.
We're organized over here, man.
The good thing about AFL, if you'd kindly stop saying Aussie rules, that's fucking something
else.
Is that, wait, what's, what's, what's there's, you know, the rules in AFL?
We call it AFL.
It's AFL.
Australian Football League.
That's the footy.
Right.
But that's Aussie rules.
No.
No, it's like different rules.
We call it the one where it's not rugby and it's not football.
It's not.
AFL, but also Aussie rules.
Yeah, right.
It's rugby, but you can kick it.
The footy.
Yeah.
So anyway, the rules are boys and boys.
Those are the rules that were standardized 150 years ago.
So I find AFL quite fucking boring on the TV.
But if you go and see it live, it's great.
I've been to a foot game.
I've been beating each other up in the, like on the outfield and everything.
Yeah.
I've been to see it a couple of times.
I've been to a couple of things.
I've been to a lot of them.
Baseball is the shit.
Baseball is the one that makes sense live.
I've tried to watch on the TV and it is the dire shit ever.
Baseball, you go, you go, you drink and you hang out and you're like, and the game is
there.
Yeah.
And the TV is dreadful, but like any time I get a chance to go and see a baseball game
in person, I will go because it is fucking great.
Yeah.
It's like, I think it seemed like a couple of Arizona and a couple of Giants games and
SF and that's like, that's like an American football.
American football, you actually go to go to the game.
Like you're watching like, because it's exciting.
Baseball you're going to drink and hang out and then there's something that's going on.
That's how I remember the footy too, because I remember getting, we were, we were watching,
but we were, there was a lot of beer flowing and things like that there too.
That fucking American football seems so fucking lazy.
They really like, fuck man.
They just like, they hike and then they like do one minute, one, well 30 seconds of work
and then they like have a break for five minutes while they find their line.
It's the slowest, most down shit ever.
It's just like, you're in carry on that.
It's like, you just push the people over.
Grab the bowling boys.
It's crazy.
That would never be, that wouldn't survive in rugby fucking hell.
Yeah.
It's too big.
Crazy athleticism though.
More than I think any other sports seriously.
But I mean, look at, look at the athleticism in there more than rugby.
You're just, I mean, there's some athleticism there, but you're.
They wear all that shit.
Joe Loamoo cap hat nearly as fast as an Olympic sprinter whilst being a tank.
I mean, there's, there is a lot of, anyway, I don't know, I'm not even that into rugby.
I don't even know why I'm, why I'm standing for it.
I don't know what, I don't even know.
Game of notes.
I don't know why I'm doing this.
Like, I'm sort of hitting everything.
That would be, that would be one of the t-shirts of all time.
So yeah.
Holy shit.
Cosmo versus coming in a couple of weeks.
Sorry.
Do you think that like the casual punter, do you think the casual punter who happens
upon our little, little group chat here?
Like, do you think that this would discourage or encourage people from crypto?
I hope this skirt.
Do we like provide any belly?
I talked to, I talked back to that omniflex thing we were talking about this morning.
I talked a ton about gaming notes today.
And, and Cisleback from omniflex backed me up as well.
Cause I was talking about like, like, we're not chilling and all this type of stuff and,
and kind of what's going into it.
But I think, I think we're running a certain.