1. It needs 2 million deposited Ether to start
A validator would need to submit 32 ether to a deposit contract to join the staking system in Ethereum 2.0. What isn’t as widely known is that we need 65536 validators for the new chain to start – roughly 2 million ether (65536 validators).
2. Your private key is online, but you can’t get hacked
When you deposit the 32 ether to become a validator, you also send in the information about the exit account and exit shard. This means that no matter what happens – whether you exit the system voluntarily or are kicked out – the money that belongs to you is sent to that specific account designated as a withdrawal address.
3. Ethereum 2 slots are 6 seconds in length, except when they aren’t
Because the genesis time and time in general in Ethereum 2.0 is expressed in Unix timestamps, and those are susceptible to leap seconds, some slots might be 5 seconds in length and some might be 7 seconds, despite being hardcoded to 6 seconds. Ahh, modern computing!
4. There are two types of penalties for validators
Inactivity leaks happen if your validator node goes offline for 18 days, and the beacon chain is not finalizing, then your balance will be reduced by up to 60.8% slash in 18 days.
Slashing: if a validator behaves provably maliciously, then they are slashed by having their balance reduced. The minimum penalty is 1 ETH, but it goes up linearly in the number of people slashed at the same time as you.
5. You don’t need a supercomputer to run a validator
Running a validator or two on weak devices like the NanoPC will be possible, however, you will probably not be able to also run a beacon node on it.
6. Not every slot has a block
Because slots are discreet units of time (~6 seconds per), it’s possible that some slots might not have blocks. That can happen when there was a disagreement between the validators, latency issues in the committee responsible for creating and attesting to the new block when a validator didn’t show up for work and they were supposed to propose a block or any other number of anomalies that cannot be predicted.
7. There is a queueing mechanism keeping the set of validators roughly the same
A queuing mechanism will make sure that the mass exits of validators are slowed down.
This means that many validators can’t leave all at once – kicked or legally exited. This is so that the number of validators of the system stays as stable as possible. If many pending exits (withdrawals) are detected, then there’s time to make staking more appealing and draw some more validators into the system through an automatic increase in the staking return rate, just like in the mining difficulty adjustment under Proof of Work.
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