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Yes, you really can lose all your ETH if you stake with Geth
This article is not an attack on Geth. I have the utmost respect for their team. Unfortunately, through no fault of the @go_ethereum team because of how widely used Geth is we need to have honest conversations about the risks of running Geth when it holds a supermajority of stake.
This week the @ethereum network witnessed another one of its execution clients, @nethermind, experience a bug that took all validators running Nethermind (~10% of the network) offline. This was a minor event because Nethermind is run by a minority of stakers.
The above is a graph of the total balance of one of my own validators that runs Nethermind. You can see that around 4am local time, the validator went offline when the bug first took place. The team released a patch ~4 hours later and by the time I installed it, the validator was back up and running around 9am local time. During this time, my validator was penalised at the same rate as what it earned rewards at. By 1pm on the same day, the validator balance was higher than it was before the outage. Overall a very minor inconvenience.
Many incorrectly assume that when running Geth, if a similar bug were to occur, the penalty would be similar. This is not true. This has nothing to do with Geth or the way Geth has been built but everything to do with how many people are running Geth.
According to ClientDiversity.org ~84% of all validators on Ethereum are running Geth. Now in these staker’s defence, Geth is unarguably the best and most stable client. Whilst minority clients, like Nethermind this week, have been plagued with bugs and downtime, Geth has run faultlessly since the Merge (and long before). In my own experience, I have found higher resource requirements and more missed attestations on my validators when switching from Geth to a minority client.
Nobody wants to move away from Geth if they know they are more likely to experience more missed attestations and more downtime, especially those whose business model depends on uptime to advertise the highest yield, such as professional staking operators.
As of September last year, it is estimated that @LidoFinance, the largest stake operator, runs ~76% of their validators on Geth.
But I’m glad I’m running a minority client, even if I’m losing a few extra rewards here and there, not because I’m altruistic and am sacrificing a personal gain for the good of the decentralisation of the network, but because I know that my precious ETH is safe from a supermajority bug.
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