December 2021 or Q1 2022 at the latest. The difficulty bomb is scheduled to activate in December so a fork of some kind will be needed to reset it so everyone is working diligently towards December as the ship date.

The difficulty bomb was supposed to first activate 4 years ago. It has been pushed back numerous times, about 6 times IIRC. I wouldn't be surprised if come December they push it back one more time.

Difficulty bombs were connected with consecutive Ethereum protocol upgrades - not just POS. Most of them ended up with network upgrades.

Once PoS is activated for mainnet in December (or early next year), the difficulty bomb will be no más.

Well, PoS is 4 years behind schedule. That's the reason the bomb has been pushed back for 4 years.

Fair. But it feels pretty close now.

I'm running multiple mainnet ETH2 validators at home, in good company with nearly 200_000 validators worldwide (see https://beaconcha.in).

The teams behind the ETH1 and ETH2 node software (the latter has multiple independent implementations, while for ETH1 go-ethereum dominates the scene) are working hard to make "the merge" (PoS for mainnet) viable ASAP.

Disclosure: I work for status.im, but I'm not on the team responsible for nimbus-eth2/1.

Do you mind me asking what it costs to run a main net validator?

Also how do you know the number of validators is correct? In other words can’t that be Sybiled?

You can run a validator on a regular laptop or even a phone. You need to have 32 ETH minimum though, which is around $60,000.

What's stops the rich to validate fake transactions from all wallets below 32eth to their own wallets?

Why does this 32eth min exist?

Fake transactions take more than a 50% attack to execute. Because the transactions simply do not come with the required signatures.

For rolling back transactions, a 50% attack actually convinces the remaining honest nodes. For invalid transactions, even if you have 90% of the network, the remaining 10% of honest nodes will not follow the wrong chain.

This means anyone could detect this happening. At which point faith in eth will plummet, and so will prizes.

If the validator starts reporting false results, it will get "slashed" by the network, and the validator will lose some of that 32 ETH.

Correct, but I wanted to note that activating an ETH2 validator requires an exact 32 ETH deposit, no more and no less.

If you are chosen to validate but your validator is down, broken or incorrect there is a penalty where they keep some of your ETH right?

Yup. The penalty is not kept by anyone though, it’s burned. Once your balance drops to 16 ETH, you’re removed from the validator pool. This happens slowly and depends on many factors of the current network.

https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/faq

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How badly will I be penalized for being offline?

It depends. In addition to the impact of effective balance there are two important scenarios to be aware of:

Being offline while a supermajority (2/3) of validators is still online leads to relatively small penalties as there are still enough validators online for the chain to finalize. This is the expected scenario.

Being offline at the same time as more than 1/3 of the total number of validators leads to harsher penalties, since blocks do not finalize anymore. This scenario is very extreme and unlikely to happen.

Note that in the second (unlikely) scenario, you stand to progressively lose up to 50% (16 ETH) of your stake over 21 days. After 21 days you are ejected out of the validator pool. This ensures that blocks start finalizing again at some point.

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If your validator isn't online and/or not able to "do its job" in the allowed for time-period, then it will be penalized.

The penalty for missing one validation is small; the penalty for missing a block proposal is also not huge, but bigger than the penalty for missing a validation. Penalties would pile up over time if a validator is offline for an extended period.

Long story short: if you intend to run an ETH2 validator, you should be reasonably sure it will be able to run well-connected to the Internet for extended periods of time. Intermittent and brief periods of downtime would not have a substantial economic impact on your validator, but extended periods of downtime would be bad.

One question I had but was not answered by the FAQ is whether the London Mainnet updates will require updates to Beacon / validator implementations. Apologies if the answer is obvious to everyone else, but is is not obvious to me.

I'll take the over. And this is speaking as someone who has staked ETH in PoS.