Hi Jamie - best info on Full Nodes right now is probably:
There’s nothing stopping you from running cloud-based validators, and definitely nothing in the protocol from getting elected – in fact that’s how C-Labs runs the Alfajores testnet right now, and how the initial validators for Baklava will be deployed. But on mainnet, operational security is going to be very important, and I think that you will be able to achieve better security with validators being in co-los. In part this is because when hardware wallet / HSM support arrives, you won’t be able to do that via most cloud platforms.
Now, for validator proxies and the Attestation Service, I think cloud platforms (either container or VM based) are a great fit for those – especially with the DDoS protection you get. So you can combine the two approaches and have a VPN connection between the proxy/proxies and the validator.
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Yes absolutely all holders of Celo Gold get to vote. So far the ability to lock Gold and to vote is only available via the CLI but the team working on the Celo Wallet are exploring how best to bring this feature to end users. Having validator groups I hope will simplify the UX here.
Of course, there is DAppKit which lets you connect third party apps to the Celo Wallet and it would be exciting to explore the possibility of new voting/governance mobile apps…
Great question! For the Stake Off, you will get sent enough testnet Celo Gold (24,000) to be able to create both a group (10,000 stake) and a single validator (10,000) stake. Of course, if you join someone else’s group you would have enough to stand up two validators… 
See my other answer above – ideally the validator would be on a dedicated host but to get started you can deploy on a public cloud.
I’m not sure there’s any proposal for what the governance thresholds should be for certain operations like making a new stablecoin yet. I feel the focus for mainnet launch ought to be to get the first one deployed and successfully circulating!
It’s worth saying that Celo is an open platform, and anyone can create smart contracts including ERC-20 compatible tokens to it.
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At the moment the reference implementation of the Attestation Service uses Twilio (or Nexmo). But it would be great to extend this to support many other providers – and also make these providers geo specific.
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Right now, the Rewards app isn’t part of the Attestation process – the Attestation Service implementation sends the SMS directly. However it could be integrated such that each Reward App is linked to one or more validators’ Attestation Services and are randomly selected to send messages instead of the Attestation Service doing it. There are security and economics questions to figure out before that is viable I think.
Yes, one entity can be a validator group and all of its validators. (Because Celo is a decentralized system, it’s impossible to know who really is one entity or not!) In fact, for the Stake Off, you will receive enough testnet Celo Gold to register one group and one validator. If you choose to do that, yes, you can receive rewards for both.
We did record it – I’ll post a link shortly
I answered most of the questions live on the webinar but they’re not in the recording, so I’ve replied here. Feel free to ask more!
I hope so soon, but not right now. Validators use BLS signatures to sign blocks and none of the HSMs support that off the shelf. However C Labs has BLS signing working on the Nano Ledger X, which is programmable, but there is a lot of work for the team to do on signing performance. There may be other options available in the future, too.
Great question! An Attestation Service acts as a light client and, when it receives a request to send an SMS, it first checks to see if a matching Attestation Request was made and accepted on chain. That means that the user has to have already paid for the attestations. So, a bit like gas, a user can drain their own funds to make a validator spend money, but because the fee is higher than the SMS sending cost, and because it randomizes across validators, they have to spend much more than it costs any single validator.
I found the reward app via the link on the user faq.
The reward app says you can get rewards (cGold) verifying other users.
As I understand this is not yet operational. I did not see any other possibilities to get rewards in the app. Wouldn’t it be better to remove the link from the user faq for the time being, before to many people get excited and disappointed :)?
Thanks for flagging the issue. I submitted https://github.com/celo-org/celo-monorepo/pull/2065 to clarify the current state of the Celo Rewards App.
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