We should do something. Somebody should say, I think we found out who Popmos is. It's, and then we kick it off.
Welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast on the cosmos from independent validated teams.
Hello, and welcome to Game of Nodes, the weekly podcast on the cosmos from independent validators
where every single episode we're looking for more and more extreme ways to troll other people
with how we open the show. Sorry, you just got caught. So thanks for joining us. Also,
thanks to the number of people that we've got a lot of feedback as well for episode 2.5, which we
kind of did off the hoof as a result of the feedback we got from episode 2. So also lots of
thank yous to everybody that's been checking these out, giving us feedback, giving us comments,
and also suggesting topics. We're going to probably talk about a couple of things that
have been thrown our way a little bit further down the show, some stuff around smart contracts.
And should I be signing these things, TLDR, do your own research? But first, we're going to do
our regular session. Noel, do you want to take over here? Yeah, so I guess I'll start. So the
regular question to start out each week is the dumbest thing you've seen in crypto this week.
And while this might not be the dumbest thing I've ever seen, it was this week. And that was the
triple launch, or the triple fail to launch in Kraft, unfortunately, this week resulted in
trying the same Genesis at different times, three times, which resulted in, well, initially,
we did get it booted on the first Genesis, but then it all of the vote power was with one
validator, which didn't appear to work. And everyone got jailed. And then we shut that down and tried
again. But without everybody on board at another time, that was very short after the announcement,
and not enough vote. And so that went on a few days, and then tried another one, which resulted
in not enough vote, and fail to launch new Genesis, this time with another network ID.
So, you know, that's a step forward. So I guess moving around the room then, so maybe Shiltsy
to go in order of the pictures on the screen. Yeah, I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the
Cosmos Lend air drop that's happening right now. They put a tweet where they want validators to
basically market for them. And they're going to do, I want to say they're going to air drop to
seven validators, only seven, the seven with the best marketing scheme. And I have pretty strong
opinions about, you know, people giving delegations to validators over an air drop. Now I say that,
but I say that, you know, I get some of the craft bonus for my for my atom validators. So I guess
I'm, I don't know, talking crap to myself, but I'm not a huge fan of that. I think it's done.
That's what I've got for the week. So you said, but you got anything for us this week? I don't
think so. Just to defend the the the craft team, maybe not defending, but the the challenges of
test nets have been getting more and more, I think they've been getting worse over time, like in
this last few months, it seems. So I think the groups are too big and they want diversity and
validators, which I totally agree with, right? You want to be able to bring people in, especially
folks who are not running this professionally and just want to give them the opportunity to run
nodes. That's how I got in, right? So I totally get it. But when you have 60 or 70 or 120 validators
and they're global, and we kind of pick a time and then we make a mistake and then we have a
last minute get, you know, get change on a, on a whatever it is, right? We're going to change that
last minute, we're going to change the, the network ID or something similar to that. It just, it's
difficult. So I think this last one, I mean, they're going to think they started with this last
this last row around, which I thought was the right way to do it. But they started with the,
they had GenTex and they had all the kind of coins from the original GenTex that they did.
And then they started with five validators to say, okay, we'll get it going. And once it's going,
then we'll let people do a create and bring them in. And then one of the five disappeared. And so
they're right back to where they started where they didn't ever know. So it was an A for effort on
that. But I think that, that, I think we've seen, we've seen a lot of challenges with just getting
test nets off the ground, right? Yeah, I'd mention main nets, not calling out anybody in particular,
but so yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm not, I'm not hacking on craft at all. But like,
I think probably it's important if you have a failed, fail to launch, then it's important to
iterate the, the chain ID, because you get so many, you know, old nodes trying to connect,
everything gets confused. And then it just doesn't work. So I think that's a good lesson for anyone
trying to run a test net. If you get a fail to launch, just iterate the ID and re-collect GenTex
if you're going to use five people and they're there, just get a GenTex and, and pull them in
and start a new network ID. Yeah. Jaby, did you want to talk to us, man? Or did you want to,
you're driving? No, I got it. So the dumbest thing that I saw in crypto is actually a historical
relic. Katie, here we guys. Yeah. Yeah, man. So to make a long story short, in pre-proto
buff JSON days, there was a certain set of messages that you could send to Cosmos chains to do
different actions. And then once Proto Buff was introduced, some of those messages got renamed.
And so my team and I spent, I don't know, at least 48 hours trying to debug something. And it turns
out that the Proto Buff form of message delegator, withdrawal reward is message delegator, withdrawal
reward. But the Amino JSON is message delegation, withdrawal reward. And so I had been encoding
it wrong. And we found out that there was this delta. So, you know, if you're going to do
backwards compatibility or something like that, you need to go back and check the messages.
Yeah. Yeah, I guess it was between V03.39 and 0.40. But that was a fun one. That was fun.
Well, they say assumptions, the mother of all fuckups, right? Yeah. So we're kind of losing
a little bit there. I'm not 100% sure where the hell he is or what the hell he's doing. But
he's definitely going out of his way to be with us today. We've had no explanation from
where he is or what he's doing. He just showed up in a car on the phone with someone else in the car
now. And I just in a van, it's a large passenger van. I'm giving out free candy. It's totally
normal. Oh, yeah. There's another nondescript person in the vehicle. It's okay. Yeah. Oh,
get out. There you go. There was me like, there was me like all worried before this show. I had
that there was some I'm at my parents' place and there were some photos of people in my wider
family behind me. And I was like, I can't dox these people and Jaby's just in the car with his
family. And Null's obviously pointing to the family cow picture. That's a car.
That's a big tradition in Australia, of course. For those of you listening on podcast players,
Null is pointing a picture of the cow who's behind him. And also Jaby has somebody in the car with
him. Oh, and Jaby is in a car. That's probably also not obvious if you're not watching the YouTube
stream. So we still haven't finished going around the room. And I guess now is a good time to introduce
our guest this week, which is Ghost from Whispernode. Tried to join last week, but had some issues with
the hardware for the stream. So joining us this week instead. And actually, it's perfect because
now we have six because Jack's unable to join us this week. But Ghost mate, did you have something
a little bit crazy, a little bit stupid you saw in the cosmos this week?
Definitely. Cerberus proposal number two. Dude, just straight up asking like we adjust. And when
I say we I mean chill validation and we were working on proposal one. It was my first proposal ever.
I don't know about his. We pushed it live and literally hour and a half later,
someone pushed his proposal to live like, Hey, I am cute mouse. Give me money.
Something to that effect. And that was prop to like straight up hour and a half later.
And I was like, awesome way to start the chain guys.
Decentralization, man. Yeah, forgot about that. Yeah.
Yeah. So I think the total cost to make a server is, you know,
prop at the moment is probably what like two bucks.
It's 150,000 servers, which comes out to like 30 bucks, 40 bucks. Yeah. And unfortunately, the
teams hadn't had their native wallet finished yet. So they told everyone to go to the bit song
wallet, which allows you to make text proposals right through it. So someone figured that out
really quick and there you go. Here we go. There you go. So, you know, and we just dox that fact
as well. So at least what the 10 people something watching this live right now could immediately
go. Well, there you go. Don't do it. Anybody can create a proposal. Maybe some are going to
create a proposal to increase the amount required to make a proposal.
That's the whole, he did get no with Vita though. So
yeah, well, that's that's what it's there for to lose your 30 bucks.
Huge risk. So I guess I wouldn't mind circling back around to what Shiltsi started talking about
with just briefly like the the cause. Can I go with the dumbest thing I've seen this week?
Oh, I miss you. Yeah. Shit. We did actually miss you.
It's fine. But this is actually it's not quite from this week. But and I don't mean to like
just like stick the boots in or what is it you say now shovel? No. What's the slime that you use?
No, for like for like sticking it into somebody for giving them a kick in.
Oh, shit. I don't know. Twisted knife. No, it was like some like shoveling shoveling shit raking.
Right. Well, anyway, it's gonna it's gonna it's lost the mystery. So anyway, so
obviously found out about a little while ago and I thought it was a joke that the next Cosmo
first Cosmos conference is gonna be in Colombia. And I kind of just like sort of ignored that.
I was like that can't be real. And then no, it really is true. And it was 100% confirmed to me
this week. And I was like, okay, like no disrespect to the team Cosmo first and this one was amazing.
It was really good time. Met some incredible people had a great time. We're totally love to
go to another one. But Jesus Christ, I'm not going to Colombia with a target painted on my back.
So that that that is the most that is the most literally how do you really feel about Columbia?
I think I literally stick took my tea when I was like, no, no, legit, that is where it is.
I was like, cool. Yeah. As I said to them, I'm quite happily anonymously go backpacking there.
Not a problem. It probably is a really, really good time. I've been back packing in
South Central America before, but I wouldn't go to a big room advertised as this big room
will be full of crypto nerds who may or may not 100% understand what a big target.
No way. You know, someone said you're actually probably wanted this.
Have you been backpacking there before the fray?
I'm not wanted in any jurisdiction I know of, but a friend of mine got had to get smuggled
across the border to Panama, I think from Costa Rica once because of it's too complicated to
even explain why it was basically a misunderstanding, but they did have to get smuggled across the
border and somebody I know got thrown out of Bordeaux like as in escorted to the border and just
booted like Homer Simpson style into the adjacent country.
Well, neither of those things were me. I just want to clarify, neither of those were me.
They were people I know.
Alex, you're wanted in this jurisdiction.
Yeah, man. You're wanted. We want you. We wanted right here.
That's kind of wholesome. I like that.
It's a holistically wholesome show.
It's a holistically wholesome show. Speaking of holistically wholesome,
should we loop back to you wanted to loop back to Schultz's point?
Yeah, well, I think like Schultz's point is quite relevant at the moment.
I guess it's worth talking about and I guess we're all guilty.
Well, actually, we're not all guilty, but some of us here are guilty of being on the train of
delegations for airdrops. I'm guilty, King drop, but I knocked that on the head shortly after
actually announcing that and just took a snapshot because I realized like how damaging it is to
other validators. Schultz briefly touched on craft, but craft is a little bit different in that,
yes, there are bonuses for some validators, but they are also doing an airdrop to the vast
majority of people in any case. The bonus isn't that huge. I'm involved in that and I think
Schultz is involved with that and Rino, are you? I'm not sure if you and Javier are. The trade
actually dealing with various shit like that except for dealing in the various things like that.
Yeah, and I want to make the point that I don't think that Cosmos Lend, I think it's going to be
great product. I hope it's going to be great product. And I don't think that then only airdropping
to seven validators will dam the project. It's just a direction that I don't see being a positive
direction for the ecosystem to go. It starts with airdrops of tokens and then it goes to
NFTs, which we're starting to see more and more. Unity Chaos has them saying that they are giving
empty airdrops. What's going to be after that? I don't know, but as we're seeing, it's always
escalating. And to then escalate to only seven validators, that to me is just it's not the way
to go. Yeah, I don't fully understand why they've done that. It doesn't really make any sense to me.
If you want to bootstrap a project, you want to get it out to as many people as you can.
And I don't see the sense for their project in selecting seven validators, whether it's to have
them all fighting over Twitter for a bloody recognition of the project. So they can be one
of the seven validators. But I tweeted yesterday, like, how do I get involved with the project?
And then like, saw what you had to do. And now I just I'm not going to get involved with it. So
sorry to any of my delegators, but it's just it's going in a bad direction and we don't want to
encourage it. So yeah, so I mean, also, I guess, like, I got a bit of indirect shade there, because
obviously, like with the name service, we are actually okay, I need to choose my words a tiny
bit carefully here, because there is a team that are going to do an airdrop for users of that service.
But also there, I obviously don't want to give away the exact criteria that, you know, mean
eligibility or whatever. Like, but I will say that like, the way that a lot of the early doors
stuff was done with like validators just dropping to their delegators and stuff like definitely
influenced us in terms of thinking about like, what behavior are we incentivizing here. And,
you know, something, I mean, it's something that we actually, we publicly said a couple of times
as well around it was that we don't want to incentivize people just buy a load of names,
because that's also just filling up a namespace from and preventing people who will come along
later and actually want to name to build a project on top of or use for some other thing that we
haven't thought of. So that's kind of like an anti-pattern. And so, you know, we sort of like,
well, you know, the eligibility criteria are going to be like, hopefully harder to game,
it's not going to be just a validator, it's going to be more general. If there is any wider drop
than just to users, and, you know, you probably shouldn't just buy a load of names, that probably
is not a thing you should do. And yet, like, you know, some people, and it's cool, you know,
if they want to do that, that's fine. A couple of times, if I spend money, and if they like the
project or if it gives them advice, that's cool. But designing an airdrop is really hard. It's
basically what I learned from that. And if we've learned anything from Prop 16, it's that, yeah,
it's like even harder than you could possibly imagine, right? What if I bought a bunch of
names across 50 wallets and then later combine them under one wall? Would that be more?
Completely except too soon? I was talking to Shane about this the other day because
this was, this is how much time was flowing. This must have actually been more like 14 days ago.
It's just that it feels like yesterday to me because I haven't slept in like 14 days,
as my crazy eyes will probably tell you. But I was kind of trying to catch Shane from Stargaze
up on the drama. And he was like, Oh, you know, you kind of do want to restrict something, something,
something. And I was like, Shane, I'm going to just love with you right now. I have, I have bought,
I have breached the token limit on some of your NFT projects by switching projects,
burn me at the stake. So yeah, I think we all, I think most people here have done the same thing,
have bought stars using multiple wallets, right? No, I don't let you talk about
that. Well, I have on the a drop for them. I don't just bought pictures that I liked.
Yeah. Has anybody, we all, we all liked into the star, the stargaze Genesis NFTs, didn't we?
But yeah, yeah, but like, I just bought as many as I could. I have a card in the follow up ones.
I have a huge in IBC friends. I missed IBC friends. Send me one. I'll send you like that.
I've got a number of six right now. I ended up trading like I used part of my airdrop, bought
a couple of really low rank ones or, you know, like high rank jump ones, whatever, and just started
hustling my way up. And now I have like a rank six, a rank 200 and something else. So, and then
they're coming out with their next wave. So they're going to do 5,000 more. And I think in
April, I'm not mistaken. Something like that. So there's 5,000 more coming. But yeah, that's a cool
one. Nice. So we might be having some audio issues here. Someone's saying that they can't hear us.
We did hear that. Anyway, I saw that. Yeah. The only person I can't hear
properly is your surface. So man, hit your loud. Really? Yeah. Like when you put your
mouth right up to it again, when you're eating it, but still a little bit quiet, man. Okay. Thank you.
So I guess, yeah, I mean, there's not just, it's not just people doing that one thing either. Like,
there's a lot of that type of practice across at the moment. And I get it, like people are trying
to attract delegations to their validators. But I guess what kind of gets lost during all
of this is that maybe people don't consider before they re-delegate, like what the person
that they're re-delegating from or the company or the validator that they're re-delegating from
actually is providing for the ecosystem, whether or not they're giving away a free Nifty or whatever,
or a token. Are they actually supporting the ecosystem that is controlling all of this?
Is what are they doing to help it? And maybe consider, are you going to a validator that's
providing any value whatsoever to the network, or are they just giving something away or
helping you compound your rewards? So I just think there's people need to sort of
start considering more things than just jumping around from airdrop to airdrop.
And a lot of them are not really valuable. So I think the flip side of that question is,
well, what are good ways you can market yourself as a validator that don't involve
those kinds of strategies? Let's take a step back and say, you want to enter a validator set with
potentially a lower self-stake, how do you then market yourself? I will be a more acceptable
way in your opinion to market. Yeah, and it's hard to capture the attention of people,
especially when you're starting out. And it takes a long time to build a social following around
your validator. And it's tough when you start losing them to other things, to projects that
aren't providing any value to the networks. So you lose them in the hope that they'll come back,
but you kind of just consider them gone when they're gone, don't you? But hopefully, as everything
develops and goes on, people start to make more considerations and try to consider where they're
going to. I know back when Juno launched, lots of people came into the chats and they're like,
who should we delegate to? And a lot of the admins and stuff in there were saying,
things along the lines of delegate to people who do relaying or delegate to people who provide
RPCs or are involved with development because they're actively trying to help the chain
or tooling or this and that. Which was good to see, but now people, I don't see the question
as much anymore. It's all based around Twitter and where the hype is.
Yeah, RPC and Relayers I think is a big one. As somebody who has a scumbag and doesn't run RPCs
or Relayers. What a lage. I mean, I probably should be starting to run RPCs really, but it's
just one of those like, how many hours do I have in a day? Things so sorry, not sorry, I guess,
but it is definitely a thing where I kind of look when I'm looking to delegate
funds that I have somewhere where I'm like, who's running RPCs? Because that seems to me like
a kind of quite, it's a place where you can quite easily get into a tragedy of the commons,
especially when you have things like smart contract chains where I mean, the thing that
people have been talking about recently is the usage of I think Fortis is really, really RPC hungry
and it kind of hammers the RPC. And obviously, that's been a really popular airdrop recently.
So, there's situations like that where there are people running RPC nodes, so I'm seeing maybe
a return proportional to the amount of effort they're putting into running those RPCs. But then,
I don't run them myself. So I guess I can't speak to exactly how complex and how much
extra maintenance running those is on top of running a validator. I think maybe Ysirpa would
have some thoughts on that. I don't know if I, go ahead. Go ahead, Dylan. Okay, I was going to add
really quick that one thing that's pretty interesting about this conversation is that
I've talked to quite a few people who have done chain analysis on this and being a relayer,
being an RPC provider, it basically gives you zero new delegations, basically nothing. The only way
you get delegations by doing it is by speaking to the teams directly. And that can be quite effective.
Certainly, like in Secret's case it is, Mujuno's case it is, but all in all, like running those
services is very thankless. And so I guess the point in front I make is that, one, I absolutely
agree that those people deserve the support, but unfortunately, two, they don't get that support.
So like Osmosis, they put up an article like last week or two weeks ago, the support team did
about relayers and kind of supporting and provide them. And there was basically no
delegation change that happened, even though they spent all this time getting this data together and
talking about it. And it's just an unfortunate reality of the ecosystem. Right. Yeah.
Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead, Euseb. No, I was going to say, I think all that's accurate. I think it's
difficult for anybody walking in this to have a good understanding of how to be able to pick from
a moniker list, right? That's out there and it's not really published or there's no icons on
min scan that shows who's doing relaying, right? Nobody knows what relaying is and what the role
of IBC is. So I agree that that's really more of a dev kind of project ownership delegation type
structure that's going to happen. I also don't think projects are hurting for IBC relayers. Like,
it seems like there's a tremendous number of relayers that are out there and sometimes there's
too many in a channel because they have different gas and people are dropping transactions and other
types of things. So it's not that it's necessarily 100% an underserved
market right now. I would like to stop you there really quick. So that is true for a very
short time. So it's very frequent for a bunch of people to jump into relaying to set it up to put,
let's say, 10 June into it. And then once it runs out of that initial seed, they bounce and never
come back. And so you have a list of, let's say, 20 relayers or addresses on min scan things,
people relay, they really only did it four weeks or so and then it goes away. Right. And then you
generally have like three or four relayers that are actually reliably maintaining those channels
and making sure that it's healthy over a really long period. Right. Because I mean, all this stuff
that we're even from a validation perspective or relay or anything else, we're doing it for years
and years to come. And so getting into these chains or getting into these types of situations,
it's not something you just want to walk away from. Right. Exactly. Right. And the vast majority
walk away from about a week after it's set up, which is just right. Yeah. Right.
Right. So I guess like the long term relayers though from what I've seen, well, in Juneau anyway,
I'm not sure about other networks, but I know that Juneau supports their long term relayers with
the Core One wallet. They do like, I'm not sure if it's like a fortnightly or monthly
distribution to help cover those fees and stuff. So that's good to see. And I really can't wait for
like relaying to be more effective in terms of the costs and how they're handled in the module.
I would like to see, you know, those costs being covered per transaction as part of that module.
So presumably people are working on that. You might have more of an idea,
Shilty, you're a relayer. Right. Yeah. I'll give a shout out to OmniFlix here. They are,
as far as I'm aware, the first network to use the fee grant module, which allows for them to
actually pay the fee for all relink transactions for the relayers. That's awesome. That's everything
because all the time investment and server investment, but the fact that they're even
putting that forward, I think is absolutely fantastic. It's a really great move right forward
for the ecosystem. Shout out, by the way, to OmniFlix. Like they've been not rushing their
launch to catch on the hype. And they've been coming up with a lot of good ideas and talking
with their communities a lot and validators and relayers and making sure that they try and do
things as right as they can with the tools they've got at the moment and developing
more tools and stuff as well. So shout out to them, Sisla and the team. Do a great job.
And great communication for that group, right? And like they're very clear and
man, like really reach out to validators. Like you said, no, it's good stuff. The other thing we
should call out block panes, nine types of validators blog posts, which we'll link in the
description maybe here on this down below as well as in the podcast because it really, I think,
did a great job of kind of bucketing up some different types of validators within the ecosystem
and kind of how validators or at least maybe some independence that are on this podcast,
you know, review those and kind of think about how they bucket up different types of validators
that are out there. But I do agree that like there's a real discoverability and like marketing and
just value challenge within this. And somebody new coming into this and trying to just figure out
what staking is or starting to think about LPs and all those types of things. It's just one more
thing, right? And I look at this large list. And so what am I going to do? Well, they're ranked one
through 100. So I'm going to take the top. And that really not only does that not really relate
to value to adding to the chain. It really does not necessarily relate to security. It doesn't
relate to uptime. It doesn't necessarily relate to involvement. It doesn't relate to a whole
bunch of different things. And that statement is very broad. Like it's very different across
different types of chains. But it's really, I think this challenge is a really large one for
trying to bring new people in and trying to also develop diversification in the
in a validator set. Yeah. So I mean, I guess I'm guessing most of us read El Sal's blog post on
how you actually measure decentralization of a chain in terms of voting power and validator set
and that kind of thing. And what I come up with was the HFFI, what the metric that they used to
sort of evaluate it rather than using the Gini coefficient. And that was a really interesting
blog post. And I think it highlights a lot of the problems, like a kind of maybe more academic
level, the problems that you suffer with start sort of starting to get onto there, which is like,
you know, how decentralized actually are we in practice? And, you know, this is something that
we saw in Juneau when the validator set was pushed up to 125. Because we kind of hit this brick wall
of performance was degraded and performance is degraded to the point that we had to do a follow
up proposal to change the blocks per year to actually bring inflation back in line with what
it should be. But at the same time, you know, it is when you look at it, you want to intuit that
125 validators is more decentralized than 100. But the reality is that if all the delegations
are still going to the top 10, it actually doesn't move the needle on the Gini coefficient or any
kind of traditional measures of inequality, right? So you use measures of inequality to
measure voting power, because voting power as a kind of rubric for decentralization, I guess,
is it is actually academically viewable as a problem of inequality and resource allocation,
right? So that's why it's so for people that are curious, it's why I've suddenly dropped into
sort of inequality economics. That's why it's the set tools that generally used to talk about
voting power at the moment. And so, yeah, I guess, you know, it's that question of like,
how are we measuring decentralization and what is decentralization anyway? And what is the
metric of decentralization that's most useful to us? Because, you know, there's one thing that
I've been very interested in for a number of years, and I've actually distributed systems.
My background is distributed data systems to some extent. And I was recently talking to Martin
Klattman, who wrote the book, Designing Data Intensive Applications, which is an amazing
textbook if you ever want to learn about all sorts of high throughput data systems.
And his thesis is much more around the future of the system that we're trying to build in the
blockchain space are actually going to be distributed systems, but not decentralized ones,
not ones that involve a blockchain. Because local first computing, i.e.,
you know, devices interconnecting with one another, mesh nets and all that kind of stuff,
and building from the bottom up is a more decentralized way of building a resilient
network. According to that, I mean, I'm grossly simplifying a very large body of academic work
and some really cool practical applications that they've built. But I'm going to stop talking now,
but yeah, what is decentralization? I think is a really interesting question, like,
that I think we have to grapple with as validators and...
Well, the other question... I don't know how I feel about it.
Is decentralization necessary in certain applications? So, you know, for example, Juno,
the intention of that chain is to be decentralized, right? But then you take,
you know, something that's got some regulatory issues, like, you know, for example, Sage,
which is coming up, they, you know, they may need to operate in a different way
so that they can manage risks in it. So, it might not be intentionalized to be, you know,
fully decentralized. And that's not the only example. You know, what's the business model?
Does it need to be decentralized? What value is there in decentralization for some projects?
But obviously, other projects require, well, want to be, that's what they want to be.
They want to be decentralized. So, we're past. We're not like, you know, in the whole point of
proof of work, Bitcoin is that it's completely decentralized. But, you know, proof of stake,
specific, you know, application-based modules, you know, what's, is there advantage in being
decentralized? Do you need to... I guess it's kind of setting up an oligarchy,
isn't it, rather than... And this is kind of, and this is kind of back to, like, a lot of the
things that were thrown at the validators during Prop 16 is that you effectively do see
the functioning of the validator set as a potential oligarchy in a situation like that,
like in a very, where voting power really does matter and there is a contentious issue on the
table. And I think that presents the same problems. I mean, because we talked about this a few weeks
ago now, and I always said, well, what would happen if we made the entire validator set fungible?
Like, essentially, meaning that validators entry and exit to the set is very easy. So,
validators that are in the set have less security validators outside the set, have more likelihood
of entering the set and earning rewards, even if that position is, like, not easy to guarantee,
because maybe it's either done algorithmically or it's done on some metric that means people are
kicked and cycled on a regular basis. Would that be desirable? And obviously, from a business
perspective, the answer's no, right? I remember this conversation, and I was thinking,
fucking, you have to... I think you did actually call me a fucking idiot, like, delaying from the
event. You were saying some crazy shit that day. It was more academic than I had an appetite for
it four o'clock in the morning. But then it does go back to that question, it's like, what,
if you want to decentralize network, you have to do things like, yeah, cycle the validator set,
you have to make the validator set fungible, or you have to use light clients or some other method
for bringing online processing power that isn't distributed on a small set of machines, right?
So then it kind of follows that we've decided that decentralization is actually not as important
as a stable set of computing power, which then brings us onto the question as, well, okay,
at the moment we have this tragedy of the common situation where some people are like in block
panes, blog posts, which is really great, and everybody should go check it out. Second shoutout
to block pane, who's really cool tools for validators that make me look at pretty diagrams,
where all the packets are going and stuff. But you go, okay, well, if there's these different
tiers of validators, like a validator tier list, obviously, we're like, you surf as like S plus
tier, and sure as he's like H plus tier for handsome. And then there's actually kind of like,
all the way down, there's like some C minus tier, you know, like, you know, when you first start
boot up Metal Gear five, and you're abducting guys for your research base, and then like,
they just don't even move the needle somewhere in that tier, that's like me,
and our validator operation, right? So, but then the question is like, if there are all these tiers
of validators, can you do things with your chain and the way you build it to actually incentivize
that behavior? Because certainly, there are projects in proof of work, that have come up with
novel incentive structures to do things other than just incentivize people in the network to
shuffle transactions around like, are we there's a really great example of this. And they talk a lot
about the incentive structures they use to store data, right, because that's their thing. And so
you go, well, okay, should our validator sets be incentivized to run RPCs and run relays and
this kind of stuff should that stuff be mandatory. It sounds like we're almost circling around Null's
favorite topic, which is foundation delegation. I don't know, it seems like we're kind of in that
range, or incentivizing based on inequality. It's kind of, aren't we almost there? That's episode four,
right? Yeah, maybe another episode. This 40 minute rant about foundation delegation.
So would 100. So going back to I think what what Schultz brought into this into this topic was
with the idea around the cosmos prop 66, which is they want to be able to bring it from I think
it's 150 to 175. Is that right? Or is it 125? Yes, 150 to 175. So moving from 150 to 175 validators,
does it make any difference? So at all important. So the answer to that is yes, but if you did,
forgive me for like looping background, the phrase was saying back to craft, he was talking about
how different validators have like different words. And I'm going to take a moment here to
talk about like the craft test net. So one of the reasons why your genocet set is really important
is basically for this reason. For your genesis, you want a handful of strong validators that
have experienced getting a network going basically so you can create that initial stability. You can
have 1520 25. It's fine. And then once you have that initial set, then you can expand past that to
less experienced folks. And this kind of creates a an awkward incentive system. So you'll notice
that on almost all cosmos chains, you'll have Cosmos station on there because they've experienced,
but now because they're on all cosmos chains, they have the lion share of delegations. And so
you enter this strange kind of paradox where you need to experience gear chain going, but because
you are using that experience gear chain going, you are further lifting up the already experienced
people and letting those that aren't his experience kind of fall through the cracks.
There's something about heuristic where if you're joining a network, let's say a week after genesis,
there's a strong chance you will just never be profitable as a validator. Sure. I have 25 networks
are show that we're validating for and fewer than half are even paying for their server costs.
And that's quite common. And so it's an unfortunate state that I don't quite know where the point
I was eventually wrapping around to what this was, but something I wanted to point out.
But the other piece of which we saw in osmosis was like, I got pushed out of osmosis twice or we
got right on got pushed out of osmosis twice once back in fall of last year when, when really
it started to pick up and the price started to be able to shoot up. And so you had a lot more
money coming in. And then again, after they expanded from 100 to 125, we were in for maybe 45 days,
60 days or something like that. And what you saw is you saw outside money coming in from other
chains and you have validators that were not in cosmos at all that came in from in from polka
dot or came in from somewhere else that brought up for state structures in there. So you had really
large players coming in that I agree. Like the idea of being able to bring in new validators
or groups and we're all independent, right? So the idea of bringing more independence and is
obviously important to all of us, right? And like that's what we that's what I think we collectively
want. I think expanding the set does do that. I don't know if it does that for a long time. Like
we had that with, you know, messy on Juno, we've had that with other great validators who know
and have good operations, but eventually get pushed out because, you know, we always talk about
the floor's lava when you join after Genesis and when the floor is lava and meaning what we mean
by that is that as this set expands and as the minimum keeps rising, it's very difficult to be
a small independent trying to be able to build that up when you're at the bottom of the set because
nobody wants to delegate to the last 10%, right? And they just feel that as being a risk. And so
therefore that becomes a metric of staying in, which is associated to how much cash you bring
into it or the validator or the group that's behind that validator brings into it. And frankly,
as an independent validator, those numbers are usually pretty small compared to somebody coming
in from, you know, from an institution or something else like that. So I think when something like
Cosmos like when the atom wants to expand that out to 175, I look at that and say, well, that's a
good opportunity for Rhino. Like I would love to be able to be able to be a validator and atom. I
also look at the say, who is that opening a door for? And is that is that us or is it me? I should
say. Or is that is that institutions that are coming in and you know, something else similar to
that? Well, I'll share it this way. With this set expand, we're looking at this as an opportunity to
do. I mean, we're definitely not to say we can't afford what the floor was. Last I saw was something
well over $1 million, you know, and we're in 14 chains right now. So we're not doing too bad.
But like Schultz said, not all of them pay for themselves. There are some that just simply don't
even cover server console loan labor and all that. So I think expanding set is good in that. Yes,
we can bring in other validators and all that, but there is that risk of absolutely just someone
sees a chance and all right, we've got $1 million per screw. Let's get an atom set. And now we're
earning all these extra tokens that are almost always a drop to boom done. Right. And I kind of
want to tie this to what you guys were talking about before with decentralization and kind of how
I pick a validator. There's something that I've been thinking about for the past few weeks. And it
was a GitHub, basically repo that Bro and Bro validator shared. It's like December 1st of 2021.
So last year, months ago, and it's called the Bro rating. And so basically they took validators,
and I believe it was the Osmosis set, and they ranked them based on a variety of factors. So it
was like greed, reputation, community involvement, contributions, whether it was code or adding nodes
for layers, different things they were doing. And then governance, that's a big one, of course.
And all of these factors adding up and you were, this list they initially made was showing a lot
of validators that may have been a lot lower on the list actually showing up a lot higher on this
rating system because they're actively trying harder. They're not at the top stacked with all
this money and they don't have to care. We see that in a lot of these chains where the top 10,
they may not be voting anywhere near as much as everybody below them because
they're solidifying their position. They're cool. They're chilling. They've got a nice team
delegation. And with that, they just continue to get the lion's share of delegations coming in. So
I've been thinking about how could we take this rating system, build it into a simple UI that
the community could go to and it's updated on either a daily, weekly, whatever basis and people
can look at it and go, okay, I want to pick a new validator. Who should I delegate to and why? And
just based on various factors, these are things that we could all discuss and choose what metrics
matter and not go from there. I think that's a bit of the Holy Grail. I think that everybody
who's on this would want that. The big challenge of that is how do you bring that into MintScan?
How do you bring that into Kepler? How do you bring that into the Kepler?
No, it's got a question. Is that a question? I have some ideas on that. I've talked about these
with a few people in the past, but no matter what solution you go with, it's subjective to the person
who's doing the assessment and the reporting. So an idea I had was that teams who are essentially
developers of the blockchain or trusted business in the community or whoever,
some part of the system would recognize the contributions from people and assign them a revocable
NFT, non-transferable revocable NFT for that attribute. For example, if you're a relayer
and you're on the network every month ringing, you get a relayer NFT and then
MintScan picks up that NFT. If you hover over the icon on a moniker for that validator,
you get the NFTs which show their contributions to the network. How do I monitor that?
I think Noel said my idea on this, which is that I hear that there's a positive correlation
between voting and a validator's involvement in the network. I can write a smart contract to look
it up. It's easy peasy. A lot of those things can be sorted out in code. Now, with the caveat
that there are some chains that's not true of like Stargaze because of how their claim works,
they had to just put up loads of spurious governance proposals. I didn't vote on them
and I didn't need a cast because it was just like, I'm not just clicking yes to click yes
on a claim your airdrop number seven governance prop, which has no meaning.
So there are obviously some chains that would work on, some chains it wouldn't work on,
but I'm obviously quite bullish on the idea that the question of how do you know whether
somebody's running relayers, well, you can just say that there's actually, for example,
there are tiers of validators. So why does there have to be only one validator set? For the point
of view of consensus, there is only one validator set. For the point of view of actually adding
metadata to a validator set that's shown to a user or that's stored on chain, there's no reason
why there can't be more than one validator set or indeed that you can't actually change the voting
power or essentially like the rewards that a validator is getting based on criteria that you
define economically as a chain and in code. So like you get a multiplier if you provide this
service and it can be read by this smart contract and you get a multiplier.
Yeah, I mean, you changed your tone because the last time I talked about this with you,
you said I was mad. So... No, well, I think you were mad at the time, but you were talking about
other shit as well. Sorry, I didn't think I gleaned that when you were talking about this to me
before. So just actually grasp me out here because I was right. Say if you like, so say you provide
a service, right? You can pick that up in code and then if you're providing that in association
with your validator wallet or if you declare that somehow in your validator wallet transactions,
then if it picks up that service, then that is going to give you a multiplier for your rewards.
Is that what you're saying? So I'm saying you can write this. I'm saying it doesn't exist in any
Cosmos chain at the moment and it would no longer be precious stake. So you would have to write custom
code for your chain to essentially take out a band information and essentially
decide what the current state, like who is currently a validator is not just a function of
are they participating consensus is also is X other economic criteria fulfilled.
And this is something I've been thinking about a lot from going back and looking at proof of
work chains that are doing things using extra infrastructure, be it like file storage or be it
like economic incentives around document access like are we right where they essentially are
trying to get people into a, so if you want something to run three additional services as
well as a validator, the equilibrium where those services will be up is to just say,
is to not tell the validator which one you're going to look up, but only look up one of them
because you don't need to look up all three, every block or every X blocks. You just look up one
and see is it live and you never tell them which one it's going to be. If it's not live, boom,
you're out of the set for that block or that set of blocks or that tranche.
Oh yeah, no, that's where else I think you were crazy.
Yeah, well, yeah, this is the bit. Actually, this is the bit.
I'll throw some names. That's in 4am. In that same question, in that same conversation,
you were talking about randomly assigning a voter in your set of delegators.
Yeah, I mean, I think, well, I think there would be some interesting stuff around
validators not necessarily wielding their own voting power, though this is an area where obviously
the political scientists and theorists have done a lot more research than I have. But the idea that
you're sort of, a voting block exists, right? And the validator is currently the executor of that
vote. But why? Why is it not the case that that vote is not given to it, is just round robin to a
key that is delegating to that validator, and they decide how that voting block votes. And if people
don't like it, they can vote against that person's vote or that wallet's vote. And the validator
themselves, if they have a large self-state can just vote themselves. It's not like anybody's
telling you, it's just putting you, again, it's like, you know, is it necessarily right that
validators always have this privileged position to exercise that vote? Maybe it is. And we have
seen Prop 16 play, I mean, so we had this conversation a few weeks ago before Prop 16 was
even a glint in Wolf Contract's eye. So, you know, I think we've seen with Prop 16 that actually having
a block of voting power with validators who have different incentives to sort of ordinary users
might actually be a valuable thing. But I think it's also worth questioning whether or not, you
know, you could yet delegate votes to one voter, to one delegator of the validator, and then they
execute the vote for a Gov prop. I think that's quite an interesting idea. I don't know if it
would pat out well, but it could be something. It could be something that you guys could do today
with Dow, at least in Juneau. Like you could, from even King Nodes, you're Dow, you guys could
put proposals up and be able to take an initial vote and how King Nodes will vote, for example,
or something similar that you guys could do that. And as Wasm moves across chains, it might be
something to be able to think about in terms of saying, I want to, and maybe just the yes, no vote,
no with veto is not enough. But as we get into more complex voting structures and things like that,
I think the idea that a validator meeting me, this brain, making a decision for, I've been
a little bit vocal about this, but making a decision for everybody who doesn't vote is a little bit
not the perfect situation. So finding another way to be able to bring that forward or make it a
little bit more community driven, not necessarily. There's no reason you couldn't effectively model
a validator's actual vote, like the block vote, as essentially a Dow's governance prop and then say,
well, you could do that. Yeah, you could do that. And it's on that. I'm dangerous.
Cal makes a good point around the voting period and things like that. Yeah, there's a timing
issue here too, right? Because you want to be able to give your delegates who might hold a specific
token, the ability to be able to guide that vote and those types of things. But honestly, that
Dow situation is more maybe of a patch of that. No, it's more of a patch of that issue versus
kind of solving that problem. But I think it's going in the right direction. The other thing,
just back to the idea around expanding the set and those types of things, I think one thing that
if there's, you know, there's a lot of people I think are interested in the cosmos that are
listening to this, it might not be running validators and things like that. The other thing
that thinks about from a validator perspective is once you get in there, and once you kind of make
a decision, you want to be able to get into a set if that set expands is a long term viability of
that. And there's a there's kind of a issue around I want to be able to get in there. But I also
want to make sure that I can be able to be a validator for my delegates long term. And so I
was just actually going back into the osmosis, everybody goes to min scan and go osmosis validators
and look at inactive and look at the great validators that are inactive on osmosis after it
went from 125, right? You have cat boss, you have you have polkachu, right? Hugely valuable
validator in the cosmos ecosystem. You have rhino, hey, you have there's there's like a huge list of
really valuable organizations that have and whispers in there as well, right? Ghost and and
mercury others that have been really good strong proponents and very vocal and ecosystem that just
cannot stay in set. And that's not just bad for them like as a business. But but when we're
delegating across or when you have, you know, delegates, you're trying to build an ecosystem
around and like be positive in ecosystem across multiple different chains, you don't want to
let those delegates round like you don't want to let them down, right? They might redelegate to you.
And the next thing you know, you're out of the set and they're stuck for the period, maybe 14 or
28 days. That is not a good feeling for a validator. Like you want your delegates to earn. That's
number one, right? You want them to earn. And to be in a position where you're getting pushed out
of the set and then you're putting delegates in bad positions is really emotionally draining.
And so I think you see might see, you know, the set goes from 125 to 150 and you say, why aren't
you jumping in that? Well, the reason is because I'm also you want to be the right thing for the,
you know, the customers that you have. It's risky. Absolutely. You know, people can delegate to you.
And then two days later, all of a sudden, someone jumps in that has a lot more capital backing them.
And then you're gone. And they just redelegate it. So they're stuck to you. Absolutely. You know,
we were at the edge of the Gino set. You know, it was 125. We were 121 for like a week. And I was
on Twitter just going like, you know, guys, like anything like, you know, 10, I don't care, but we
were losing delegations to like, putt modes, and we were losing delegations to like, you know, all
these, oh, air drop vote stuff. And I'm not trying to drop or bash. It's just, it was really, it was
a challenge, you know, we got, we caught a lucky whale. And we really appreciated it. And now we're
like in the mid 50s, you know, restake helped a lot. But yeah, it's definitely challenging when
you're that low because people are taking a way bigger risk on you, you know, right? So
that's right. I remember the word sledge. Oh, sledge. That was the word I told you is like
shovel. That was what I was trying to remember earlier. I was, wow, that was about 45 minutes
ago. It says that I was sledging somebody, but not to discount anything that whisper node was
saying then, but yes, the right handers remember this. I think it's, I think it's because you said,
you said you didn't want to put shade on validators that were doing airdrops and it kind of dropped
me all the way back. If you like it, airdrop me all the way back to our previous conversation. I
remember the intention and the intention was not to do that. It was simply just that, yeah,
and when you're that low in the set, it's very easy to lose, you know, delegates that you had
before then to those new ones. So yeah, yeah, I'm conscious a little bit of time. I think we've,
we've kind of ended up having a pretty comprehensive discussion actually on validator,
decentralize, validators, what decentralization is in practice and how you can maybe pick a validator.
And there's so much in here. I think there was any of these topics we could probably
do an entire episode on. So there's any, if there's any bits that we've been talking about here
that are particularly interesting, then do shout them out or get in touch with us on Twitter and
that is now we can maybe like expand on some things in future episodes. Certainly, as I'm sure I had to
shut myself up because I was getting too excited about talking about economic incentives, there's
a whole bunch of stuff around extensions to proof of stake, which may or may not actually be working
on some stuff for cough, cough, cough. So, but there's also just, I think a lot that we can do
within what we're currently all validating on, which are proof of stake chains, right? And how we, I
think it was you, Sir, but he said, like, we have a stake as independent validator teams that obviously
we're biased towards bringing in more independent validators because it is inherently more stable
for all of us to work together when we are all small, similar styled organizations and businesses.
Whereas, yeah, like if somebody comes in with a huge like bag from Solana and just buys their way
into a set and knocks one of us out, it's like, okay, that kind of sucks. But yeah, in the interest
of time, should we move on to our final question, our final regular question we do every week?
Yeah, yeah, quickly. Yeah, there's a quick. Okay. What is your target? Is it an hour?
It's about an hour, I think. Like we always go a little bit over by talking to you final question,
but, you know, I think, I think let's try and keep, I think we try and keep it into an hour.
And if people think the subject wasn't dealt, dealt enough time, they can always have a go at us
in the comments and we can come back around to it. Flame is in the comments. So we get more
impressions. Yeah, sledges in the comments. Yeah, sledges in the comments for impressions sake.
So all right then, well, let's go around the room then with our end of show question,
which is what are you most excited about this week? Maybe we'll go and order this time. So
DeFray, what are you excited about, man? I don't want to mention Prop 16 again,
but I'm going to mention it. I am excited about that. I think Prop 17 is currently passing,
which is the software upgrade, the nerdy software upgrade that allows us to do governance contracts.
Yeah. I'm kind of excited to get Unity audited, get it put together and get it put in front of
the community. I genuinely think this is next level tech. This is the next level opportunity
to show the maturity of Juno's technology and its community. And I don't think there's really
anything in the Cosmos ecosystem right now that is as exciting as the idea of resolving this solution,
discover the situation with a smart contract. So that's what I'm excited about.
Awesome. Whisper? 100%. I'm going to go on the meme side and say, OZ for Chihuahua.
Running a restake fork and just all that. I'm excited for like 12, 1300% APY. So
huge fan of Tom's. Big shout out to EcoState for building restake. I know a lot of us use it.
A lot of people are watching or definitely probably using it. And yeah, I'm just excited for Chihuahua.
I finally enable that. So it's got to be mine. Yeah, man. Always a shout out to Tom.
Whisper? I think this week, I'm not going to say most again, because that's my answer last two weeks.
So even though I see progress, things are happening. I'm excited for that coming back.
I do think that this week we're going to see a turnaround on Cosmos token prices.
Can we talk about prices? We've had a bit of a slide. You've got to say that's a game of
notes price chat. We have a bit of a slide for a few weeks. And I guess we're just paying off
the debts that Cosmos had during while the rest of the crypto markets slid and now we're paying
for that a little bit. Back to Chihuahua and the great work that's being done at Stargaze and
others. I'm hoping to see that we see some of the value that comes out of that. Kind of move
forward here. I would agree also on kind of prop 17 and moving forward the upgrade. We talked
about this last week and just the diversity in terms of viewpoints and those types of things.
But I think if we can move together towards a solution and move past this, that's the best
possible thing. And so it seems like that's finally going in the right direction as well.
So I'm excited to see what happens in the next week. We'll find out how we talk next Wednesday
just in terms of making more progress associated with that.
Yeah, awesome. Chelsea?
Yeah. So again, the thing I'm most excited about is more than just a week. But
secret network is something of like my home network. And lately they've been getting
a lot of heat after the shade airdrop. The network basically slowed to a halt. But they have a lot
of really cool things going on that are happening soon. They have query notes that should make
the network speed up. And they also have a lot of really cool things going on for governance that I
think that other cosmos chains can take note of. And so I'm really excited for those improvements
that are coming basically just around the corner for secret because secret is my home.
Can query notes, we could take what's being done there and apply it to the rest of these chains?
I don't think so. The query note optimizations are really based around how SGX handles it
potentially. But I err towards not my discussions with the core developers.
That'd be pretty cool for RPC nodes and API nodes and things like that right here versus
actually keeping a whole copy of the chain and everything else.
Yeah, absolutely. There's something ridiculous like a 5000% performance increase.
Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, so I think that's really exciting for me personally.
That's awesome, man. What am I excited about? Man, Prop 17, that was pretty cool that it wasn't
the actual prop it was supposed to be. And it's an upgrade. I like that. But I'm excited for that
upgrade. This smart contract governance I think is going to be like a really big thing now that
someone's pulled the trigger and done it. I'm excited to see what developers do with it as well
in expanding it and its capabilities. And yeah, man, I think it's really exciting. And if you
don't know what I'm talking about, go back and listen to episode 2.5. A lot of good discussion
about that prop and what it brings to Juno. So yeah, man, I'm excited about that.
So I guess that brings us to the end unless anyone else has something they wanted to discuss.
DeFray, do you want to do your wrap up, man, with your like and subscribe?
Do you know what I actually just realized? I didn't do a like and subscribe at the end of 2.5.
I think we just said thank you for listening to our nerd chat and then hit the button.
So with that in mind, thank you everybody for listening as always. It's been really,
really cool. And this was kind of a dumb idea that we all kind of came up with. I think Null
in particular pushed us off the cliff to the, you know, we should do a podcast. And the fact
that people listen to it is still surprising and awesome. So thank you for bearing with us. For
those of you that haven't yet subscribed and liked, you should do that by the buttons down below.
Hit the bell icon if you're on YouTube as well so you get notifications of upcoming streams.
And if you're on other podcast players, leave us a comment or a rating depending on which one
you're on because that will help us get a little bit more visibility. And also, it means that you
say your surfers hard work in distributing it to all those other platforms is not wasted.
Though if you're listening, of course it's not wasted anyway.
It's on Spotify, right? It's everywhere. Oh yeah. No, definitely get on Spotify. I got it.
So I did want to mention actually just a couple other things on top of that for that. I think we
should just remind everyone at the end here that we are independent validators. If you do like what
we're doing and maybe research our nodes and if you like how we look, maybe give us a consider
delegating to us as well, which we probably should mention. And other than that, if you have
suggestions that you want us to talk about on the show or you think we can improve and anything
whether you want us all to be in cars while we're doing the podcast, just let us know.
So other than that, thanks a lot.