A couple of noobs over here but very excited for the what’s possible with the DeFi economy and greater degrees of freedom generally.
We are doing research currently to become ETH validators because this looks doable and we want to do SOMETHING besides owning some cryptocurrency to support the development of this…project, I guess you would call it. How do you name a world-changing initiate led by the people!?
Anyway, I digress…
Question is what’s the difference between the projected future ability of the advanced and extreme boxes provided by DAppNode. In other words, what are we choosing by going with an i5 1 TB hard drive vs an i7 4 TB hard drive, or whatever the exact differences are.
Is this all about timing? The box with last ‘x’ long… or are there functional limitations: your box will only help 5 people, etc.
Let me give it a try, but starting from the bottom:
Your box presumably run a node. You are helping the Ethereum network by doing so. Even if you will be connected to around 25 peers at any given time, what you are helping is everyone using the network, by making it more resilient, distributed, hard to shut down, easy to sync. Oh, you meant your pals? No probs, you can give them VPN access to your node if they are developers (so they can stop using Infura’s API) and query the node directly and there’s probably a very high limit on the people you can share your node with. Note that the share VPN access function can be customized to give full Admin UI access or only offer RPC endpoint access so they can connect to the nodes but not mess around with your settings. Although if you are running a validator with this machine you might want to consider reducing attack vectors by not sharing too much about it.
Regarding the time limitations, both versions come with super-fast NVMe storage. These bad boys are meant to last 4 to 5 years but could last longer. The rest of the machine should be able to outlive that easily. At the rate Ethereum and the crypto world changes, that’s a long time!
So, when it comes to choosing between Advance or Xtreme… depends on what you want to do with it!
Are you going to run more nodes? Now a Geth full node is close to 400GB I believe, so you have room for it plus the beacon chain - which will start pretty small and keep pretty small as long as transactions and more functionality is not added. It seems that TurboGeth is pushing the efficiency frontier on the full node size, so I would say when it becomes stable a Full Node will have a lot of room to grow in a 1TB disk.
If you want to run more nodes, testnets, bitcoin, monero, you name it - then the Xtreme is your friend. That’s a bad boi.
In terms of the validation, they can both validate easily several validators. The validation process is not computationally intensive and both the i5 and i7 are really capable machines where the marginal cost of one more validator deposit is negligible after running the Eth1 node, Beacon chain and validator client.