Following @vitalik.eth’s EthResearch post yesterday (https://ethresear.ch/t/sticking-to-8192-signatures-per-slot-post-ssf-how-and-why/17989) on what comes after single-slot finality, I have two questions for the experts:

PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Aviator, diver, ETH maxi, nexialist | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

1/ Why not first increase the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE as previously proposed and assess the consolidating effect on validator count down to a more manageable number of signatures?

2/ If a 1K validator committee is too small and makes a 51% attack economical (because non-selected hostile validators are safe from slashing), why not a much larger committee, say at least 2^15 validators which is just over 1M ETH? Are large-ish committees impractical?

Robust Incentives Group @ Ethereum Foundation

https://rig.ethereum.org

Thank you @barnabe, and I’m grateful that you’re here to shed light on this. I understand the need to plan for more permanent solutions.

On a related note, is there now a decision and timeline to implement the MaxEB increase and the related EIP-7251? I realize they’re barely a few months old.

Different views, the argument from @fradamt that convinced me is that we anyways need to plan updates such as SSF for the worst case, since in an adversarial setting validators can revert to disaggregating. So doing MaxEB and wait to see if it’s effective enough is not enough (I am still bullish MaxEB in general)

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

Currently: WhatsABI

It’s a great question.

Solo stakers are not many and whales among them are even fewer, so I don’t imagine that group would move the needle much.

But among LST pools, it may make a difference. With MEB set to 4,096, they could reduce their validator count by 128x and thus lower their hardware requirements

So we have ~900k validators today, how much do you think increasing the max balance would reduce it? Hard to imagine it dropping <10k let alone <100k.

I do agree that's the first step (I think the post aligns with that too).