Apliqué a Run a Node Grants: Run A Node Grants | Ethereum Foundation ESP
Con esto podríamos dar inicio a la fase 1 del plan del banqueer, iniciar el cluster de nodos y conectarlos a mainnet. Esta es la aplicación:
Team/ Individuals Description - A brief summary of you or your team’s relevant experience
The hackerspace from Costa Rica is a laboratory for experimenting with free technologies.
We have two workspaces:
- A virtual bunqueer in https://bunqueer.jaquerespeis.org
- And a non-virtual bunqueer in Barrio Escalante, in the center of San José.
In these spaces we collaborate with our friends who bring varied skills and ways of knowing, we are always making remixes with everything and everybody that shows up. We hack technology, we disassemble, redesign, build, remix, and repair it to support our local non-digital interests, from music to agriculture, territory, language, and healing.
We have been working for 15 years promoting free software, free hardware, and free culture in Central America.
Currently we have active projects (tagged as “proyecto” in our bunqueer) focused on collaborative maps, the right to repair, book sharing, bartering, farmers markets, learning about technology and magic, translations and local radios:
https://bunqueer.jaquerespeis.org/tag/proyecto
Describe your motivation for running a node.
One of the projects we are running is called the banqueer. It starts with a low budget low bandwidth node to test arm devices and ethereum client software, then it grows into a cluster of nodes with DVT, and eventually lands in a circle of credits without interest for the communities that maintain the nodes.
For this project we got an initial small grant of $2000 from Ethereum Foundation and EthKipu. With this money we bought the hardware and paid for the time of the 5 contributors that will be testing, reporting issues, translating and writing guides, and maintaining the node in testnet. Currently, we are waiting for the hardware to go through customes.
More details here:
After the testing phase we need more budget to run the cluster of nodes in mainnet. With an extra grant we can pay for the hardware of the second node and the stake to register the validator. Copying the 5 phases from the above link, note that now we are looking for support to get started with phase 1.
Phase 0, testnet
1 month
Test ethereum on arm. (this is the scope of the EthKipu grant)
Once we have the validator stable and producing blocks, we will continue the next phases. We will ask for more grants, contributions and investments to support this work.
Phase 1, mainnet (this run-a-node-grant will help us getting this phase started)
3 months
Build 5 arm devices, spread them in different places in Costa Rica for geographic diversity, with different bandwidth, power supply, and technical experience for accessibility. This cluster will be one Ethereum mainnet validator using distributed validator technology for resilience, all possible combinations of client software for diversity, and proposing transactions from the mempool for censorship resistance. We will collaborate with open collective to make sure that we can receive funds and use them in a transparent and legal way.
Phase 2, rosca
9 months
The profit from operating the validator, plus donations, plus the resources from the team will be pooled for circular credits without interest. We will experiment about banking for well-being, will learn from ancient economic practices that resonate with the cycles of this land, will focus on healing our relations with all the vibrations that support us. We will collaborate with Ethereum to make sure that the protocol is inclusive and decentralized.
Phase 3, ubi
1 year
Share the abundance, turn the circle into a spiral. Start a universal basic income for all the contributors of the jaquerespeis. We will work with https://circles.garden/, expand our bartering market, make workshops in the communities of our friends, learn from their ways of existence, promote more validators seeded by the Latin American hackerspaces.
Phase 4, liquid
5 years
How do we relate with the global economy outside of our trusted spiral? How do we relate with the people who inhabit our non-virtual communities, or who have been dispossessed from their lands?
We can run more validators and mint a liquid token to reward investors. We will collaborate with rocket pool, lido and ethstakers. We can run nodes, sequencers, relays, builders, searchers, connecting to other chains, extract more value, and replicate the model.
Describe your expertise and experience with nodes and clients.
I work as a researcher at Flashbots, and during the past year I coordinated our team in preparation for MEV-boost and the merge. As part of that I continuously ran all the possible combinations of execution and consensus clients. I’ve also been a linux sysadmin in the past, but I’m just maintaining a couple of servers now.
Members of our hackerspace that will contribute to this project are running a rocketpool node in the cloud. We are also experimenting with staking through lido and coinbase.
We have a datacenter in our non-virtual hackerspace where many services are maintained, like email, dns, storarge, streaming, vpn… We have plenty of experience with infrastructure-as-code and keeping servers secure and running.
Proposed Impact
Again, copying from the description of our banqueer project:
The ways of the north have been imposed on the south for 500 years. It has not worked. This land resists, it is generous, its cycles keep renewing it, its people resist and rebel. There is so much to learn from these ways of being. It is fundamental for a global economic system to be decentralized and allow others to participate. It is critical for the evolution of the system to integrate what these others have to teach us.
Validators are all in the north, all in a handful of corporate data centers, 2/3 controlled by Lido and Coinbase.
We will start a project to have low-budget validators in many houses in the south.
The first question: is the technology ready? That’s what we are exploring on the EthKipu grant. Collaborate with the client development teams to make sure that nodes can run in raspberry pis and similar devices.
Following questions: how can we fund the 32 eth? how can we spread and multiply the abundance that results from operating the node, how can we share our learnings about cryptocurrencies and the opportunities that result from not being enslaved to a local bank, to local capitalistic corporations, to patriarchal governments? how can we connect to local economies that are based on trust and do not require complicated cryptography? how can we connect to the global economy without replicating its violence? how can we do it without extracting every possible profit for individual gain? how can we do it without disconnecting ourselves from our land, our past and our future?
Total amount
1000$ + 32 eth
Challenges
- Some client software might not be able to run on low budget servers, so we will be limited to run the most efficient ones. The first device will be used for testing, so we will report all our issues to the development teams, raise awareness for devices outside of datacenters in the north, and help as beta testers for every improvement.
- To form the cluster of 5 devices we still require more funds. Getting one test node running just requires a couple of thousands of dollars. Getting a cluster in mainnet raises the budget a lot. The challenge it to get all the funds until the project can sustain itself with the validator rewards.
- The DVT technology won’t be ready for our use case, which is a trusted cluster of low budget, low bandwidth nodes. We will raise the importance of this usecase and work with the development teams as beta testers too.
- Paying the contributors in Costa Rica is challenging, because there is no legislation for the use of cryptocurrency, local banks close accounts when the deposited money comes from crypto, the exchanges are not available here, nor debit cards or anything, and informal exchange is risky. We are preparing a separate grant to explore the options and start the conversation with the government to make use of cryptocurrencies clear and legal. This is the underlying challenge, because unless we can pay our contributors in a way that they can use to support the expenses of their families, we are replicating an extractivist colonialist capitalist model taking advantage of cheap labor in the South. At Flashbots we are researching the redistribution topic to imagine ways to do it differently: https://collective.flashbots.net/t/re-distribution-study-circle/1548