I have not posted anything since last week, the family has been a little sick with the season change here in Australia and I have been focusing on adding few changes to my Steemed Phish Chrome browser extension as I think Phishing is a serious problem that can affect anyone.
Learn with me
As usual, with each of my witness report, I will share with you what I have learned during my journey as a witness on the Steem blockchain.
Last week, @supersoju asked me some great questions:
"if all the witnesses are offline, that means no Steemit? or if only a couple are online, that means slow connection to Steemit? So where is the data/blocks stored? On each witness computer or server?"
That is right, without no witnesses, there would be no Steemit.com. Actually, Steemit.com will still be up and you can still read posts, comment and upvote etc... but you won't see it reflected on the website because there would be no witness to add those transactions into the blockchain.
How it works is Steemit.com and the Steem blockchain are two separate entity. Steemit.com is just a web interface for us, the users, to be able to read and interact with content contained inside the blockchain. If a content is not in the blockchain, you will not see it. The blockchain itself is hosted on various servers (or nodes) such as the witness nodes, seed nodes and RPC (or full) nodes.
When you do something on Steemit.com that requires the creation of a transaction that will go into the blockchain, Steemit.com will send the transaction to a RPC (Remote Procedure Call) node. The RPC node receives a huge amount of hit per second, they are the decentralised APIs used by all the website on top of the Steem Blockchain (@busy.org, @utopian-io, Steemd.com, Steemdb.com etc...). Those transactions will then be broadcasted to the witness currently selected by the system to witness and validate the transactions and put them in a block.
Seed nodes are there to allow witnesses to sync their local copy of the blockchain with the new and old blocks. Here is an view of what my witness receives constantly from the seed nodes:
You can see from the screenshot above lines with text such as "Got 39 transactions on block 21110559 by thecryptodrive". This is a seed node that tells me that @thecryptodrive has witnessed and validated 39 transactions (blogs, comments, upvote, transfers etc...) and have put them in a block identified as 21110559. The latency is the time it took to receive the block, the lower the latency the better because my witness only have 3 seconds to validate and generate a block.
Thank you @ausbitbank for answering some of my own questions.
I remember reading somewhere as a witness you would need to leave your computer on
That is correct. The machine on which the witness software is running on needs to be left on 24/7/365.25. That means I constantly have to monitor the state of the server or use some tools to monitor it for me. I'm not using a personal computer at home but rent a dedicated server and pay a monthly fee for it. It is a cost that I'm currently not paying back with the Steem Power I'm earning as a witness, so part of it is out of my own pocket. As more people vote for me, I will go up in the rank and will have better odds at generating a block and earning more. Currently, 1 block = 0.97 SP and I've just started to get more or less 2 blocks per day which is starting to get closer to what I need to pay off my monthly server rental fee. Not counting the time I spend doing all this.
What's new since last update?
- my current ranking position is 118 (95 if only counting active witnesses)
- I've generated 14 blocks so far, none missed yet (touching wood)
- @dylen discovered my witness upvote from last week and understood the importance of voting for witness. He then started to choose his 30 witnesses to vote for. Good on you mate!
- I've been occasionally involved in https://steem.chat/channel/witness and https://steem.chat/channel/help to help witnesses and users with their troubles
- I've been checking on ways to improve my witness server and have applied few of the tips from this post: @bitcoinparadise/how-to-setup-a-low-cost-low-memory-basic-witness-seed-node
- here is my CPU/Memory/Swap usage
- I'm still working on my Steemed Phish Chrome browser extension
- I've launched three IPFS node to help DTubers from Australia and New Zealand by pinning their videos. One node is in Canada, one in Sydney and one is on my personal laptop. Currently only have 10GB of allocated disk space but I will soon expand a little bit. This should allow their videos to stay up longer before being purged by @dtube when they get older and less popular. Thank you to @evildido who has developed Dtube Community Support (DCS), a script that allows anyone to pin a video into their local IPFS node. I've added a contribution to his project that allows an easy spin up of a combo of IPFS + DCS in a Docker container. I'm waiting for a pull request approval and will submit it to Utopian. Here is the current cached videos:
Vote for your 30 witnesses
Credits
- The image at the top has been generated with the Canva app using my own photo.
Related content
- Witness report 2018-03-22 - Two weeks, two blocks
- Witness report 2018-03-16 - My first few days
- New Steem Witness announcement! Greetings from @quochuy
- My first votes for Witnesses
I don't follow for follow, I don't upvote for upvote. If you make quality posts that I like/enjoy then I will upvote and/or follow you