Having been part of the testnet, going from zero knowledge to running my own GETH node + 100 validators, my prediction for the next few weeks...

https://twitter.com/Tetranode/status/1323547076911718400

1/ It took me a week on-and-off to gather the wherewithal to onboard myself, with the help of CT, @ethStaker Discord and @prylabs Discord.

We are still in the pre-tooling phase and the stuff I ran had no GUI... it was all command lines.

2/ If you have experience running DOS games with launch parameters, this is familiar territory. For the rest used to GUI, there is a learning curve.

There is a technical hurdle to getting it to work, as you can see in my OP reference. Lots of parameter tweaks and dead-ends.

3/ There are much more staking lots than the required 16,384... I saw numerous RL friends with normal jobs collecting multiple staking lots over the years... yet it is only now, after the 2.0 news broke, that they begun the onboarding process...

We are in the latent phase.

4/ Given that it takes effort to figure out the technicals to operating a validator, I expect that in the first week, only the most technically literate operator would get in... last I checked there were 42,000 ETH deposited. https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cbb839cbe05303d7705fa

5/ I myself am doing a few last minute checks and will soon exit #medalla to begin the onboarding for Mainnet.

Prediction: Over time, as more ETH holders get past the technical hurdle, more and more stakers will deposit in the next few weeks.

6/ The inflection point is probably around 50%, where the rest of the stakers will rush to compete for the right to stake at genesis.

Anything beyond the first 16,384 validators will have to queue up and wait their turn.

7/ The market will respond to an imminent launch, it's probably forming a cup right now, unsure of meeting the Dec. 1st date. It might be delayed like Cyberpunk 2077 :)

As more $ETH is deposited, the market will begin the next impulse... https://twitter.com/Tetranode/status/1324907990630105088

8/ Few things are guaranteed.

What I do know is: any $ETH deposited to the contract stays there. It can only progress forward, not backwards!

The engine will eventually start!

Don't let the market whipsaw you around, moon is a path-independent position!