Community voices concern over Ethereum staking difficulties

After transition of Ethereum to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithm, users faced difficulties launching their own Ethereum staking. They discussed the topic in thread on Reddit.

The community member who posted it noted that with sufficient technical experience they spent the weekend setting up a validator node on their own device. In his words, those with busier schedules will find it difficult to do this, if only because of a lack of time.

“The Ethereum community loves to embellish usability, but it’s more useful to simply admit: this [staking] is not for everyone yet,” he said.

Many agreed with his view. One commenter stressed that setting up a node requires “more effort than one might expect from the average person.”

Users also noted existing, at least in the United States, restrictions by internet service providers on bandwidth and data transfer limits.

A large number of write operations to solid-state drives (SSDs) during Ethereum node operation leads to rapid wear, one community member noted. He said that after a few months of running the Geth client two 512 GB SSDs failed. By contrast, a similar device has been used in Dash staking since 2017 and remains functional, he noted.

Another community member stated that staking was never intended to be publicly accessible, and requires a certain amount of knowledge.

“People continue to treat staking as if it’s free money, when it is not. You are actually paid for doing work, and it requires a certain amount of knowledge and effort,” he wrote.

Some noted that the difficulty of launching a validator node adds to the realization that it involves locking up more than $40,000 — 32 ETH.

“That’s true. Holding ETH is risky enough, and adding staking makes me nervous. And that’s well above $40,000 for anyone who bought in last year,” one commenter admitted.

The community noted that problems with launching a validator node lead many to to use centralized services like Binance, Coinbase, or Kraken. This negatively affects network decentralization, users say.

As noted by Merkle Science’s lead researcher Kobi Morgan, the migration of Ethereum to PoS could make the blockchain more vulnerable to government interference and censorship.

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