Extending the Austrian School

Until recently, I was a crypto skeptic and believed Bitcoin-like proof-of-work was as good as it could get in the crypto world, because it draws the closest parallels to the supply-demand dynamics of the gold, silver, and commodities markets. I was somewhat traditionally fiscally conservative and a believer in the Austrian School of Economics for a very long time. While I still believe the principles of the Austrian School will hold true in this physical Universe, I’ve extended my school of thought to explain network effects. I treat these extensions as "overrides" in this ever-so-dynamically-evolving world. I admire Ethereum as a network and have come to believe that networks are the core aspect of economics itself. Gold, Silver, Dollars, BTC, ETH—they all proliferate, but only because of networks.

Invented in 2013, Ethereum allows organizations to create smart contracts, which enable transacting entities to codify agreements directly into the blockchain. Despite its many scaling challenges, Ethereum has remained relevant, clocking in at a ~$200B market cap at the time of writing. There’s already plenty out there on Ethereum, the Austrian School, money, and economics—so I won’t dwell on that here. But at some point, I’ll write about my own interpretation of economics, substantiating my networks-are-everything belief and adding my voice to the Internet’s collective ontology.

Developer Perspective: Why Run Your Own Node?

My focus in this article is on the Ethereum blockchain—and specifically, from the point of view of a developer, not someone interested in running a node to earn staking rewards. As a developer: 1. I want to communicate with the network over APIs. Being a stingy man, I’m not keen on paid full-node solutions, of which there are many (Infura, Alchemy, QuickNode). 2. I like having control over the hardware and software updates. 3. I’m taking this as an opportunity to dive into the internals of go-ethereum (Geth) and Prysm. When I say "full-node", I’m deliberately excluding archive nodes. Those are a different beast, and may pose a different set of challenges. I only need a full-node for now.

Limitations with ETH APIs

From a future-focused perspective, I think the current set of Ethereum APIs isn't exhaustive or ergonomic for power users. These APIs are designed to be foundational—and that’s fine—but it falls to operators and service providers to build composite solutions on top of them. By composite, I don’t mean L2s. In fact, I imagine this category of solutions as one that spans across layers: giving me the ability to query not just Ethereum, but also L2 chains like Base, Arbitrum, and others. What we lack today is a repertoire of composite tooling for reliable, performant, and exhaustive querying of blockchain state. What these would manifest as would be materializations, map-reduce solutions, APIs, novel storage, and observability tools on top of current APIs. I’ll talk more about extra-API extensibility in a future post.

Prysm and go-ethereum: A Developer’s Duo

A quick primer before we jump into setup instructions. Ethereum has two main components since the shift to Proof of Stake: the execution layer and the consensus layer. go-ethereum (Geth)_

Install the prerequisite software to run the Ethereum and Prysm code inside Docker containers.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | \
    sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg

echo \
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian \
  $(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install \
      docker-ce \
      docker-ce-cli \
      containerd.io \
      docker-buildx-plugin \
      docker-compose-plugin

# Verify Installation
sudo systemctl status docker

Set up Geth and Prysm:

# Create the directories for Geth and Prysm data
mkdir -p $HOME/ethereum/geth $HOME/ethereum/prysm

# Generate JWT secret and copy it to both directories
openssl rand -hex 32 | sudo tee $HOME/ethereum/geth/jwtsecret
cp $HOME/ethereum/geth/jwtsecret $HOME/ethereum/prysm/jwtsecret

# Set correct permissions for JWT secret files
chmod 644 $HOME/ethereum/geth/jwtsecret
chmod 644 $HOME/ethereum/prysm/jwtsecret

# Create Docker network for both containers
sudo docker network create eth-net

# Stop and remove existing containers if they exist
sudo docker stop eth-node prysm || true
sudo docker rm eth-node prysm || true

Run the eth-node and Prysm containers

sudo docker run -d --name eth-node --network eth-net --restart unless-stopped \
    -p 8545:8545 -p 8551:8551 -p 30303:30303 -p 30303:30303/udp \
    -v $HOME/ethereum/geth:/root/.ethereum \
    ethereum/client-go \
    --syncmode "snap" \
    --http \
    --http.addr 0.0.0.0 \
    --http.port 8545 \
    --authrpc.port 8551 \
    --authrpc.addr 0.0.0.0 \
    --authrpc.vhosts="eth-node"

# Wait for Geth to start up
sleep 30

# Run Prysm with appropriate settings
sudo docker run -d --name prysm --network eth-net --restart unless-stopped \
  -v $HOME/ethereum/prysm:/data \
  -p 4000:4000 -p 13000:13000 -p 12000:12000/udp \
  gcr.io/prysmaticlabs/prysm/beacon-chain:latest \
  --datadir=/data \
  --jwt-secret=/data/jwtsecret \
  --accept-terms-of-use \
  --execution-endpoint=http://eth-node:8551

# Check if containers are up and running
echo "Checking container status:"
sudo docker ps --format "table {{.Names}}\t{{.Status}}"

# Check Geth's logs for confirmation of HTTP server start
echo "Geth's HTTP server status:"
sudo docker logs eth-node | grep "HTTP server started"

# Check Prysm's logs for connection confirmation
echo "Prysm's connection status:"
sudo docker logs prysm | grep "Connected to new endpoint"

# Monitor both logs for any errors or warnings
echo "Monitoring Geth logs for errors:"
sudo docker logs eth-node -f &
echo "Monitoring Prysm logs for errors:"
sudo docker logs prysm -f &