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Comment by chrischattin | Hacker News Reader

In Ethereum, you need 32 ETH, which is around ~$120k. That's prohibitive a normal person. After EIP1559 goes into effect, it's not out of the question that the price could rise 7x given the power laws at play. What happens when the cost to stake a node is $1M+? What happens 50 years from only the very richest .00001% can afford to run a node?

I'm concerned EIP1559 and PoS is a very short sighted implementation that will move towards centralization of the network.

There should be a floating minimum, or have no minimum at all to run a node. Not sure the exact tech solution, or I'd be submitting a pull request :).

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You can do pooled staking with smaller amounts, with little bit lost security:

https://capitalgram.com/posts/ethereum-2.0-staking-and-stake...

32 ETH was set when it cost much less.

That can always be changed if the number or validators is not sufficient to decentralize the network.

Yeah yeah, everything can always be changed in the future.

Ethereum regularly undergoes hard forks to change its parameters. There's no schelling point over protocol specifics with Ethereum like there is with, say, Bitcoin.

Genuine question: Who decides that?

When there is a prominent founder, everyone usually tends to defer to them (in this case, Vitalik, see what happened to ETC vs ETH).

That's was my point. The ability to stake shouldn't be based on an arbitrary and temporary exchange rate. What happens if USD/ETH is $0.0001? $1B? It should still work regardless of the exchange rate.

Current implementation depends on the exchange rate and creates an incentive structure towards centralization.

> Current implementation depends on the exchange rate

No, it does not. You are staking ETH, not USD. Essentially, you are staking a percentage of all ETH, percentage capped from below.

The decision to use 32 ETH was a trade off based on the exchange rate at the time, 32ETH being ~$5k, which the devs thought was enough so that it wouldn’t be cost prohibitive to get involved and hurt enough to stay honest. When the exchange rate changes dramatically, like it did and will in the future, it changes the incentive structure in staking. So, yes, the current implementation’s incentive structures do depend on the exchange rate.

32 ETH wasn't chosen randomly. There is a cost to having too many validators on the network. 32 ETH was chosen to make sure that didn't happen while still being low enough to allow for a lot of validators.

There are discussions to lower the ETH collateral requirements. Right now there is no validator cap so that will lead to issues. The goal is to first set a max validator cap with a rotating validator pool. However, there's still higher priority items to complete first like the merge, unlocking withdrawals, and likely also sharding. Given that, it's liking like this change would come 2 years from now unless priorities change (and assuming there's consensus for such a change).

We’ll solve that problem in 50 years, don’t you think? BTC and ETH are just pioneers in the future of financial systems.

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