Welcome Stakesaurs (Staker-saurs) 🦖 Hope you like the name I have chosen for you guys, the self-sovereign node operators of the future! Reasons for choosing this name are because (1) dinosaurs took smoke from no one for millions of years (self-sovereignty) and (2) I like dinosaurs.

Key Steps:

1. Preparing your hardware
2. Prepare the operating system
3. Securing your server and client machines - eg. setting up firewalls, SSH
4. Validator key generation
5. Set up and configure execution layer software (Geth)
6. Set up and configure consensus layer software (Lighthouse)
7. Deposit Goerli ETH into the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake deposit contract to activate your validator

Conceptual overview and walkthrough

Before we dive in and get lost in the technical steps, let us first ELI5 the whole thing and look at what we are doing when setting up an Ethereum validator node.

1) Preparing your hardware:

An Ethereum validator node is basically a server which sits in your home and a server is basically a computer - eg. Your desktop could also act as a server. This computer talks to other computers (servers) in the Ethereum network to process transactions and secure the network.

A server is typically accessed remotely by you, the owner, using another computer called a client machine - eg. your laptop could be a client machine.

What we need to do at this step is to ensure we assemble the server with sufficient computing power (ie. CPU speed, RAM, SSD storage) and the right operating system (ie. Ubuntu). For practice, we can spin up a virtual machine via Google Cloud with the necessary specifications.

2) Preparing the operating system:

An operating system (OS) is the base layer where all your apps run on top of - eg. Windows, Mac, Linux (Ubuntu). The software you will be running to operate your validator node are essentially apps. Here you want to make sure your OS is on the latest compatible version and other pre-requisites are fulfilled to run the validator apps.