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Become an Active Witness

Table of Contents:

A Block-Producing Witness

Requirements

  • A registered account in the corresponding network
  • Some funds in the account to pay for the registration fee
  • Executable binary
  • Lifetime Member (LTM) status

Technical Specifications

  • Dedicated servers with minimum 16 GB (32 GB advised) Ram and
  • SSD disks advised

Active Witness Duties

  • Be a reliable blockproducer
  • Maintain a public seednode
  • Publish accurate, frequently updated (check 1-2 times per hour), price feeds for the Smart Coins & Market Pegged Assets

How to become a Block-Producing Witness

Overview - Steps

  • Run the Witness/Full Node on the network
  • Create a CLI wallet for the network
  • Import your account (and funds) into CLI wallet
  • Upgrade an account to a lifetime member
  • Register a new witness
  • Upvote the witness with our funds
  • Configuration of the Witness Node
  • Verifying Block Production

1. Run the Witness/Full Node on the Network

We first run the witness node without block production and connect it to the P2P network with the following command:

$ programs/witness_node/witness_node --rpc-endpoint 127.0.0.1:8090

This command opens a RPC port 8090 for localhost so that we can later connect the CLI wallet with it. After the network was synced and periodically receives new blocks from other participants, we can go on to the next step.

2. Create a CLI Wallet

We now open up the cli_wallet. The following command connects to our plain Witness (Fill) node:

$ programs/cli_wallet/cli_wallet -s ws://127.0.0.1:8090

After launched the wallet successfully, first thing to do is setting up a password for the newly created wallet prior to importing any private keys:

set_password

new >>> set_password <password>
set_password <password>
null
locked >>>

unlock

locked >>> unlock "<password>"
unlock "<password>"
null
unlocked >>>

Wallet creation is now done.

3. Import your Account (and funds) into CLI Wallet

To gain access to Blockchain, we import the account name (owner key) and the balance containing (active key) into the CLI wallet:

import_key (owner wifkey), import_key (active wifkey), list_my_accounts , list_account_balances

>>> import_key <accountname> <owner wif key>
true
>>> import_key <accountname> <active wif key>
true
>>> list_my_accounts
[{
    "id": "1.2.15",
    ...
    "name": <accountname>,
    ...
]
>>> list_account_balances <accountname>
XXXXXXX BTS

Both keys can be exported from the web wallet.

4. Upgrade your Account to a Lifetime Member

upgrade_account

Since only lifetime members can become witnesses, you must first upgrade to a lifetime member. This step costs the lifetime-upgrade fee:

>>> upgrade_account <accountname> true
[a transaction in json format]

5. Registering a New Witness

To become a witness and be able to produce blocks, you first need to create a witness object that can be voted in.

create_witness

>>> create_witness <accountname> "http://<url-to-proposal>" true
{
  "ref_block_num": 139,
  "ref_block_prefix": 3692461913,
  "relative_expiration": 3,
  "operations": [[
  21,{
    "fee": {
      "amount": 0,
      "asset_id": "1.3.0"
    },
    "witness_account": "1.2.16",
    "url": "url-to-proposal",
    "block_signing_key": "<PUBLIC KEY>",
    "initial_secret": "00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
  }
]
  ],
  "signatures": [
      "1f2ad5597af2ac4bf7a50f1eef2db49c9c0f7616718776624c2c09a2dd72a0c53a26e8c2bc928f783624c4632924330fc03f08345c8f40b9790efa2e4157184a37"
  ]
}

Our witness is registered, but it can’t produce blocks because nobody has voted it in. You can see the current list of active witnesses by the following command:

get_global_properties

>>> get_global_properties
{
  "active_witnesses": [
"1.6.0",
"1.6.1",
"1.6.2",
"1.6.3",
"1.6.4",
"1.6.5",
"1.6.7",
"1.6.8",
"1.6.9"
  ],
  ...

6. Upvote the Witness

Now, we should vote our witness in. Vote all of the shares your account <accountname> in favor of your new witness.

vote_for_witness

>>> vote_for_witness <accountname> <accountname> true true
[a transaction in json format]

Note: If you want to experiment with things that require voting, be aware that votes are only tallied once per day at the maintenance interval. get_dynamic_global_properties tells us when that will be in next_maintenance_time. Once the next maintenance interval passes, run get_global_properties again and you should see that your new witness has been voted in.

We need to wait until the next maintenance interval until we can see votes casted for our witness.

7. Configuration of the Witness Node

Get the witness object using get_witness and take note of two things.

parameter
id (i.e. witness-id) is displayed in get_global_properties when the witness is voted in, and we will need it on the witness_node command line to produce blocks
signing_key (i.e. private-key) the public signing_key, we can look up the corresponding private key.

get_witness

>>> get_witness <accountname>
{
  [...]
  "id": "1.6.10",
  "signing_key": "GPH7vQ7GmRSJfDHxKdBmWMeDMFENpmHWKn99J457BNApiX1T5TNM8",
  [...]
}

Once we have both values, run dump_private_keys which lists the public-key private-key pairs to find the private key.

Warning: dump_private_keys will display your keys unencrypted on the terminal, don’t do this with someone looking over your shoulder.

dump_private_keys

>>> dump_private_keys
[[
  ...
  ],[
"GPH7vQ7GmRSJfDHxKdBmWMeDMFENpmHWKn99J457BNApiX1T5TNM8",
"5JGi7DM7J8fSTizZ4D9roNgd8dUc5pirUe9taxYCUUsnvQ4zCaQ"
  ]
]

Now we need to start the witness, so shut down the wallet (ctrl-d), and shut down the witness (ctrl-c).

Re-launch the witness, now mentioning the new witness 1.6.10 and its keypair:

./witness_node --rpc-endpoint=127.0.0.1:8090 \
               --witness-id '"1.6.10"' \
               --private-key '["GPH7vQ7GmRSJfDHxKdBmWMeDMFENpmHWKn99J457BNApiX1T5TNM8", "5JGi7DM7J8fSTizZ4D9roNgd8dUc5pirUe9taxYCUUsnvQ4zCaQ"]'

Alternatively, you can also add this line into your config.ini:

witness-id = "1.6.10"
private-key = ["GPH7vQ7GmRSJfDHxKdBmWMeDMFENpmHWKn99J457BNApiX1T5TNM8","5JGi7DM7J8fSTizZ4D9roNgd8dUc5pirUe9taxYCUUsnvQ4zCaQ"]

Note: Make sure to use YOUR public/private keys instead of the once given above!

8. Verifying Block Production

If you monitor the output of the witness_node and you have been voted in the top list of block producing witnesses, you should see it generate blocks signed by your witness:

Witness 1.6.10 production slot has arrived; generating a block now...
Generated block #367 with timestamp 2015-07-05T20:46:30 at time 2015-07-05T20:46:30

Backup Server

To stay a reliable block producer it is recommend you have a ‘hot swappable’ backup server with same specs as the live server running an instance of witness_node. IT IS IMPORTANT THAT THIS BACKUP SHOULD NOT HAVE THE SAME SIGNING KEY PAIR in the config.ini as your main node!

How it works:

  1. Your ‘live’ witness node is signing blocks with the private key which is stated in the config.ini.
  2. Your ‘backup’ witness node is running a copy of the software with another private key in the config.ini (generate a new public/private keypair with cli_wallet command: suggest_brain_key).
  3. On a third server you monitor your ‘live’ node on regular intervals with an automated script (e.g.: https://github.com/roelandp/Bitshares-Witness-Monitor).
  4. As soon as your ‘live’ node is starting to fail producing blocks the ‘missing blocks’ parameter increases and you can issue a command to update_witness to your backup’s ‘Public Key’.
  5. Investigate the issue with your ‘live’ node and stay happy.

Price Feeds

Besides producing new blocks another very important task of the witness is to feed ACCURATE prices into the blockchain. Educational material on how this can be implemented is available in scripts/pricefeed at github together with the corresponding documentation.

Only active witnesses are allowed to publish pricefeeds for the ‘official’ currency / smartcoin markets. For any other asset you need to be whitelisted by the creator of the market to be able to publish pricefeeds.

A couple of price feed scripts in various stages of development and for you to code-inspect and try. (You can always setup a testnet node and test the publishing of pricefeeds).

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