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Trust-Less 2020 Dystopia Labs | How To Identify Which Proof-Of-Stake Networks Are Worth Mining | With Luke Youngblood (Exec. @ Coinbase Custody)

Trust-Less 2020 Dystopia Labs

How To Identify Which Proof-Of-Stake Networks Are Worth Mining

With Luke Youngblood (Exec. @ Coinbase Custody)

https://trust-less-2020.dystopialabs.com/

video link

PoS is Accelerating in 2020

Temperature of the Water

  • 8% market cap for PoS currencies
  • expected to grow to 20%
  • 100M annual fee revenue for miners/validators
  • Early birds (like tezos and ethereum2.0? have high participation rates)
  • fewer investors in later networks (venture capital funded)
  • cosmos 'Game of Stakes' method (incentivized testnet)
    • helps decentralize token distribution
    • trains operators

Why incentivize testnets?

  • PoS need to maintain independent and geographically diverse validators
    • reduce cartel formation
  • Voting power should be evenly distributed across parties (validators)
  • early backers of new PoS networks are primarily venture capital firms
  • Quality Assurance (find bugs early and in testnet)

He Participated in "Game of Stakes" series 6, Dec 2018 - Jan. 2019.

  • requires 2/3 quorum (testnet upgrade required global community)

  • withdraw rewards + re-delegate

    • rate of inflation accelerated simulating years of network activity in a few week so fitme
    • to come out ahead, had to constantly withdraw + re-delegate
  • Adversarial network

    • censoring transactions
    • required work to make sure transactions were sent through

    AWS Activate

    • easy + risk free way to manage validators as a service

    Great entry point into getting into cryptocurrency engineering jobs at exchanges,

Many more incentivized testnetes

  • Celo Stake off
  • Cosmos Game of Zones
  • Polkadot Kusama

How to Select?

If your desire is to profit from the operation:

  • understand operational costs
    • cloud + datacenter costs
    • bond or deposit required to stake
    • human cost (your time is not free)
    • experts (legal, accounting, tax)

Tezos Example:

description, cost, recommended quantity, extended cost
cloudHSM clusters, 2116.80, 4, 8467.20
tezos public nodes, 128.33, 24, 3079.92
tezos private nodes, 128.33, 24, 3079.92
network load balancers, 24.60, 4, 98.40
bastion hosts, 10.11, 24, 242.64
baker nodes, 89.33, 16, 1429.28
estimated data transfer costs, 500, 1, 500

subtotal: 16897.36

business support costs, 1182.82, 1, 1182.82

total 18,080.18

Understand the Risks

Understand risks with validation on a given network Understand mitigations

  • slashing risks
    • good redundancy
  • business continuity
  • legal and financial
    • proof of stake validation is a brand new financial service
      • do you need a money transmitter license? (required in some juridsictions)

Track private key material! Understand when they are exposed Understand how to rotate keys + validators

Model Loss + Profit

model various profit + loss scenarios to help understand what is required for profitability

Annual Expenses, Delegated Ammount, Price in USD, Rate of Return, Commission/Fee, Profit
120,000.00, 5,000,000.00, 4.00, 8.00%, 10.00%, 40,000.00
120,000.00, 5,000,000.00, 2.00, 8.00%, 10.00%, -40,000.00
120,000.00, 10,000,000.00, 2.00, 8.00%, 10.00%, 40,000.00

How to Get involved?

  • setup a validator
  • create unique smart contracts
  • economics + game theory
    • how to take advantage of it
      • polkadot validator nomination example

build tooling, apply for grants

  • new networks need block explorers
    • what's going on
      • who's sending + receiving money

tezos foundation grant program

  • since july 2018
  • 62 entities/projects
  • 23 countries
  • 37.4M total so far (Feb 2020)
  • tezos foundation has 650 million worth of bitcoin

Q+A

(at 39 minute mark)

AWS Activate + Google Cloud Credits

aws activate

  • students

Google has one

Accounting + Expenses

  • in US, definitely should
  • setup LLC, Sole-prop, s-corp, etc

Toqueville group (helps businesses)

  • Working on cloudformation scripts (with speaker)
  • process of documenting (with speaker)

HSM

  • Uses YubiHSM
  • over vpn to validator in cloud

Tezos Foundation routes all logs to sumo logic, helps them with security analysis

@jnaulty
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jnaulty commented May 13, 2020

One Medium Post from Ben Davenport that I recommend reading through to get a different perspective on the PoS space:
A Stake to the Heart - Why Uncle Sam Loves Proof of Stake

Assuming most of the premises in his post are correct, the most poignant statements for me are:

So, clearly, if you’re going to hold one of these coins, you need to be a staker, otherwise you are going to be diluted continually by others who do stake.

But, if everyone stakes, then there is no return to be provided by the non-stakers, there is just inflation, which does not provide a real return. Of course there may always be a few irrational actors who choose not to stake. But in general, the staking yield should be thought of more as the penalty rate for non-stakers than as the reward rate for stakers.

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