 For down the rabbit hole, which is the special segment where I ask myself the question that I wanted to ask myself But you fail to ask so I get to ask it instead and then answer it and pretend like it's an original question That nobody ever thought of before because I asked it great question, Andreas All right, so What is Ethereum 2.0 when is it happening? Is it real and what should I expect? Now you asked similar questions, but I wanted to phrase it in that particular way and Great question Andreas. What is Ethereum 2.0? Ethereum 2.0 is a clean slate design of Ethereum intended to replace Ethereum In a state transition that will occur approximately one to two years from now This represents a transition of Ethereum from a proof-of-work system to a proof-of-stake system and also from a single chain system to a sharded chain system of 64 parallel executing chains which are converged on a coordination chain called the beacon chain The beacon chain itself is a chain that doesn't actually store any of the transactions or data Instead the beacon chain is the basis for the proof-of-stake system It keeps track of the proof-of-stake validators Validators are those who commit 32 ether and that is the minimum commit you can make to become a validator And then validate blocks if they validate them correctly They get rewarded with a percentage return of between 2% and up to possibly 18% per annum on their underlying stake If on the other hand they validate an incorrect block they get severely penalized In some cases losing up to 100% of their staked amount Although I believe in the first implementation. It's not that harsh, but it's certainly a lot worse than the reward Heavily incentivizing people to validate correctly Validators also get penalized if when called to validate a block they are not online So being online continuously is a requirement to be a validator If a validator gets penalized several times as they lose stake they reach a point where their stake drops below 16 ether and they get kicked out of the validation pool So how do validators get chosen? Well, that's part of the job of the beacon chain and it uses a randomness engine called Randall VDF as far as I understand it and Randall VDF or verifiable delay function is a system that produces a random number generator through consensus This random number generator is used to select validators from the pool of validators and give them the opportunity to validate a block So validators stake into a contract They put down their 32 ether or more of stake and then they wait until they are called to validate by the selection of a random number that identifies them as a chosen validator and Then they validate the block that they are handed If they validate it correctly, they can earn a small reward. There are some other nuances and details That's what the beacon chain does the beacon chain was launched on August 4th and is currently operating as a testnet It had been in testing for almost two years And now it is running with validators staking testnet ether This phase called phase zero is intended to last between one and two years At the end of this starts phase one and phase one is the transition of the is the introduction of shards and the transition of the system from proof of work to proof of stake and Then phase 1.5 is the incorporation of the existing ETH 1 chain into the ETH 2 chain and this is done as a state copy meaning that Whatever balances smart contracts addresses and things you owned on the ETH 1 chain thereafter become available on the ETH 2 chain and the users don't have to change anything the entire ETH 1 chain runs as one of the 64 shards and This allows for scaling of a factor of up to 64x all of the shards then get coordinated into the beacon chain at specified intervals. I believe those are called epochs So that's the plan Ethereum is moving to proof of stake and the sharded scalable architecture and the intention wants instead of trying to make incremental disruptive changes to the base Ethereum chain instead it's it was implemented as a clean slate implementation Which at some point has a migration of state so that it subsumes the entire ETH 1 chain in a way that users Don't even notice and all of their data state and funds are carried forward to the ETH 2 chain this allowed for much more radical Experimentation and Rewriting of code from scratch in order to implement these rather ambitious goals. So it's running right now Don't know how long it's going to run that depends on how well it runs in the first couple of days There was a bit of a shortage of validators, but I believe that's being fixed now. I'm watching it with great interest I'm not currently running a validation node. Unfortunately I don't have the time to keep it up and running and Monitor it carefully because as I mentioned before if it goes down you lose money even for test net ether I'm not willing to Do that because I really don't have the time But I am watching this rather carefully and with great interest because if this Implementation is successful it represents a very significant advancement in the science of consensus algorithms And in the science of proof of stake Interestingly, there's another question that came up related to this which might be a good segue from this down the rabbit hole So that was my Question of the day. I hope you enjoyed it If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe like and share All my work is shared for free. So if you want to support it join me on patreon