Increase the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE – a modest proposal

Proof-of-Stake
14

I like this idea :slight_smile:

My main concern with the proposal as currently written is that it seems to degrade the UX for home stakers. Based on my reading of the code in your current proposal, if you’re a home staker with a single validator and you opt into being a compounding validator, you won’t experience a withdrawal until you’ve generated MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE_MAXEB - MIN_ACTIVATION_BALANCE ETH, which (based on your 11 year calculation) would take ~66 years.

Speaking for myself, I don’t think I’d want to opt into this without some way to trigger a partial withdrawal before reaching that point. You have to pay taxes on your staking income after all :wink:

Off the top of my head, I can think of 2 ways to mitigate this:

  1. Enable MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE_MAXEB to be a configurable multiple of 32 up to 2048 by either adding a byte to every validator record or utilizing the WITHDRAWAL_PREFIX and reserving bytes 0x01…0x40 to indicate the multiple of 32.
  2. Enable execution-layer initiated partial withdrawals

Note that 1 is a bit of a hack. I’ve heard 2 discussed before and (after reading some comments) it looks like @wander already mentioned this