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Witnesses

The role of a witness in the Blurt Blockchain is to verify incoming transactions, produce blocks when scheduled, participate in governance. In addition to this, there is a formal expectation that Witnesses advocate for the Blurt blockchain, review software, and build the Blurt community.

Witness Hardware

As many of you are aware, the hardware spec needed for running a Steem/Hive witness has grown significantly over the years!

privex.io currently offers a highly optomized Hive witness setup that they call Node In A Box(TM).

We have had some discussions about a Blurt-Flavored "Node In A Box(TM)", so in the long-term as the chain grows, their services may limit your costs and risks.

Additionally, a non-docker bash script AND a docker-based script will be developed and included in this repository.

Our goal should be to ensure that we do not run on any single infrastructure provider. While many of us have a bit of a bare-metal server fetish, the fact is that for Blurt's launch and likely for at least the first six months of Blurt's operation, you're not going to need a huge machine to operate a Witness. We are considering further optomizations to Blurtd which would permanently lower the RAM consumption on both Witness and Seed nodes, but that's as of yet incomplete. Here is a reasonable machine spec that should give you a ton of growing room.

Infrastructure Providers: What's important here is that everyone is not using only a single provider.

Provider Machine Types Price Special Feature
hetzner.de Bare Metal and Cloud Competitive Cheap Bare Metal
privex.io Bare Metal and Cloud Mid-range Privacy, Peering, Cryptocurrency Payments, Witness Optomization, Team has steemed since 2016
vultr.com cloud and bare metal Mid-Range Easy and straightforward
digitalocean.com cloud mid-range tutorial ecosystem
contabo.com cloud low Price AND one time I saw a contabo node outperform nearly all others in a network stress test situation on the akash.io testnet.
Your local hosting provider bare metal ? Diversify the Witness Set
GCE Cloud high admin features
AWS Cooud high industry leader for infrastructure

Machine Spec: Your Witness machine spec is entirely your choice. This recommended spec should be relatively low cost ($5-20 per month) and should also run your Blurt Witness very effectively.

Accurate as of June 15, 2020:

Blurt Witness Spec

Component Size
CPU 2+ Cores
RAM 4GB
Storage 80+GB

Witness Setup Procedure

Valid for Mainnet, July 4, 2020:

Check out this BLOG POST with instructional video!

If you plan to use our automated setup, your witness node should run Debian 10. If you're doing it manually, feel free to use any type of machine that you'd like.

Configure Passwordless SSH Logins: IMPORTANT!

Make sure that you disable password logins on your witness machine and that you login to it ONLY using an SSH keypair. If you rent a machine with password logins enabled by default, no problem. Do like:

ssh-copy-id root@youripaddresshere

Enter your SSH password, and ssh-copy-id will copy your SSH public key to the server so that you no longer need to use a password to login.

Test this like:

ssh root@youripaddresshere

If it doesn't ask you for a password, you've been successful in setting up proper passwordless SSH that uses a signature by your SSH private key to authenticate you instead of a password. If it asks for a password, you've failed.

After you've SSH'd into your server (without it asking for a password) on your server, you should disable password-based logins like this:

nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Find this line:

#PasswordAuthentication yes

You should change it to:

PasswordAuthentication no

Press ctrl + o to save the file, and ctrl + x to exit the nano editor.

Then run

service ssh restart

DO NOT OPERATE A BLURT WITNESS WITH PASSWORD AUTHENTICATION ENABLED.

Set up a Blurt Full Node

We've reduced setting up a full node to a single-line installer. Run the following command as root on your fresh Debian 10 physical or virtual machine.

bash <(curl -s https://gitlab.com/blurt/blurt/-/raw/dev/doc/witnesses/witness.bash)

Now you've just got to wait a bit for your machine to import 1.3 million Steem accounts and sync the Blurt Blockchain. To monitor this process, do like:

journalctl -u blurtd -f

When you see individual blocks being produced, it's done and you're ready to proceed

Exit the scrolling monitoring logs with Ctrl+C

The script sets up a Blurt Full Node, but setting up a Witness will always be a manual process. In order to run a witness, you'll need to import your Blurt active key using the cli_wallet so that you can sign a witness_update transaction that announces your Witness candidacy to the blockchain. Blurt is a Steem fork, so Steem active keys from 20 May 2020 or earlier will also work.

So now you'll need to run cli_wallet. (type cli_wallet and hit enter)

The first thing you should do is set a password, like:

set_password yourpassword

You'll also want to suggest_brain_key.

Copy down its entire output and keep it safely. You'll be using this brain key to control your Witness.

import your Blurt Active key (Note: Pre 20 March 2020 Steem keys will also work)

import_key 5KABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZ

Note: The key should start with a 5 as per the example key above.

Add private brain key to config.ini to sign blocks as a Witness

First exit the cli_wallet:

Ctrl+D

In the code below, replace BRAIN_KEY_WIF_PRIV_KEY with the previously generated Brain wif_priv_key and replace "jacobgadikian" with your own Blurt account name:

echo "private-key = BRAIN_KEY_WIF_PRIV_KEY" >> /blurt/config.ini
echo 'witness = "jacobgadikian"' >> /blurt/config.ini
systemctl restart blurtd
systemctl status blurtd

Paste all four of the lines above in one hit into the command line and press enter once.

Declare that you're a Witness

Use the command cli_wallet to go back into the wallet and then unlock it with:

unlock yourpasswordhere

Use the below code, but first replace the "jacobgadikian" Blurt account name with your own; also replace the blog URL with your own blog url (Blurt, Hive, Medium, Steem etc) and the Brain public key with yours, which you generated previously:

update_witness "jacobgadikian" "https://your-blog-url" "BRAIN_KEY_PUB_KEY_GOES_HERE" {"account_creation_fee":"10.000 BLURT","maximum_block_size":65536} true

Success looks like this:

{
  "ref_block_num": 12141,
  "ref_block_prefix": 747640993,
  "expiration": "2020-06-15T16:54:30",
  "operations": [[
      "witness_update",{
        "owner": "jacobgadikian",
        "url": "https://whaleshares.io/@faddat",
        "block_signing_key": "BLT8mBSoVWNcXqsk2PHTfJCxRz9ebJgz8e1WgAnuqQBpTjs9UXqGh",
        "props": {
          "account_creation_fee": "3.000 BLURT",
          "maximum_block_size": 65536,
          "account_subsidy_budget": 797,
          "account_subsidy_decay": 347321
        },
        "fee": "0.000 BLURT"
      }
    ]
  ],
  "extensions": [],
  "signatures": [
    "1f132ce16452adf8667be7a0bb9bf909396dcea8e21093729a8c1b072fd3ad4f9909aa675a131871b0feb582077ea2b7a78c675155e0125f33c5376c087f2438f7"
  ],
  "transaction_id": "d28314a76b29cfb30e8c8de40c819ae38b538181",
  "block_num": 12142,
  "transaction_num": 0
}

It's also a very good idea for you to vote for yourself from the cli_wallet, so that you will begin to make blocks:

Note: You'll want to replace jacobgadikian with your own Blurt account name in the next voting step. The first name is the account that you're voting from and the second name with placeholder 'gopher23' is the account that you're voting for.

vote for yourself

vote_for_witness jacobgadikian jacobgadikian true true

vote for someone else (gopher23 in this case)

vote_for_witness jacobgadikian gopher23 true true

Success for voting for gopher23 witness looks like:

{
  "ref_block_num": 35495,
  "ref_block_prefix": 2258033885,
  "expiration": "2020-06-16T12:23:03",
  "operations": [[
      "account_witness_vote",{
        "account": "jacobgadikian",
        "witness": "gopher23",
        "approve": true
      }
    ]
  ],
  "extensions": [],
  "signatures": [
    "1f7f104f99d77fdb397ef2ec01f178185efe7baa01077afd094dd34a9ecee68ea7511659ef3bfb829c333ae967746c8dd14282fe847bce693a96046f29308ead03"
  ],
  "transaction_id": "1472efb61fb35a65afe69f4c0f9344009b951462",
  "block_num": 35496,
  "transaction_num": 0
}

Updating Fees

The Blurt blockchain has fees for every transaction, including voting, posting, power up, power down, transfers, reblurt etc witnesses set the fees according to network demand, ie higher fees when spam is prolific and lower fees when global user activity reduces. Free transactions are a myth, witnesses subsidise free transactions with every increasing server costs to keep up with chain bloat, fees help witnesses keep the bloat down to a minimum.

Fees are calculated as a median of consensus witness fees. Have a look at what fees other witnesses have set on https://blocks.blurtwallet.com/#/witnesses

Set the fees from your unlocked wallet using the below string, remembering to replace "jacobgadikian" with your witness account name and inserting your wallet Public Brain Key where specified. You can also adjust account_creation_fee, operation_flat_fee and bandwidth_kbytes_fee as desired.

update_witness_properties "jacobgadikian" {"key":"BRAIN_KEY_PUB_KEY_GOES_HERE", "account_creation_fee":"10.000 BLURT","maximum_block_size":65536,"account_subsidy_budget": 797, "account_subsidy_decay": 347321, "operation_flat_fee":"0.001 BLURT","bandwidth_kbytes_fee":"0.100 BLURT"} true

If you're a witness, you're done now.

Full Nodes and Seed Nodes should

systemctl start ipfs-hardened

Common Cli Wallet Commands

Open Cli Wallet:

cli_wallet

Unlock Wallet:

unlock yourpassword

Exit Cli Wallet:

Ctrl+D

Common Blurtd Commands

Check block production status by printing one minute of history to your terminal:

journalctl -u blurtd --no-pager --since "1 minute ago"

Monitor the blockchain continuously:

journalctl -u blurtd -f

Monitor your node continuously, all processes:

journalctl -f

Stop blurtd

systemctl stop blurtd

Start blurtd

systemctl start blurtd

Restart blurtd

systemctl restart blurtd

Replay Blockchain

systemctl stop blurtd
blurtd --data-dir /blurt --replay-blockchain

Edit config.ini

nano /blurt/config.ini

Updating for HF1

Enter the cli_wallet

Disable your witness

In the below command, replace jacobgadikian with your Blurt account name and the blog url with your own. Note the BLT1111111111111111111111111111111114T1Anm key is the global default key to disable the witness.

update_witness "jacobgadikian" "https://your-blog-url" "BLT1111111111111111111111111111111114T1Anm" {"account_creation_fee":"10.000 BLURT","maximum_block_size":65536} true

Then ctrl+d to exit the wallet.

upgrade your binary

systemctl stop blurtd
wget -O blurt.zip https://gitlab.com/blurt/blurt/-/jobs/630888073/artifacts/download?file_type=archive
unzip blurt.zip
mv build/programs/blurtd/blurtd_witness /usr/bin/blurtd
chmod +x /usr/bin/blurtd

Edit the systemd unit

nano /etc/systemd/system/blurtd.service

Change it so that exec start looks like this:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/blurtd --replay --data-dir /blurt

Ctrl+o to write the changes, hit ENTER to complete the writing, Ctrl+x to exit.

Reload Daemon

systemctl daemon-reload

Start blurtd

systemctl start blurtd

Wait for chain to sync

journalctl -u blurtd -f

When you start seeing scrolling text showing blocks being produced it is synced! Example: Got 0 transactions on block 150005 by blurtplus -- Block Time Offset: -342 ms

enable your witness

Enter the cli_wallet

Replace jacobgadikian with your Blurt account name and the blog url with your own.

update_witness "jacobgadikian" "https://your-blog-url" "BRAIN_KEY_PUB_KEY_GOES_HERE" {"account_creation_fee":"10.000 BLURT","maximum_block_size":65536} true

Exit wallet with Ctrl+d

Edit the systemd unit and change back to default value

nano /etc/systemd/system/blurtd.service

Change back exec start to look like this:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/blurtd --data-dir /blurt

Ctrl+o to write the changes, hit ENTER to complete the writing, Ctrl+x to exit.

Finally check a block explorer to see that you are broadcasting the new version number.

Upgrading for HF2

Enter the cli_wallet

Disable your witness

In the below command, replace jacobgadikian with your Blurt account name and the blog url with your own. Note the BLT1111111111111111111111111111111114T1Anm key is the global default key to disable the witness.

update_witness "jacobgadikian" "https://your-blog-url" "BLT1111111111111111111111111111111114T1Anm" {"account_creation_fee":"10.000 BLURT","maximum_block_size":65536} true

Then ctrl+d to exit the wallet.

upgrade your binary

systemctl stop blurtd
wget https://gitlab.com/blurt/blurt/-/jobs/675578369/artifacts/raw/build/bin/blurtd   
mv blurtd /usr/bin/blurtd
chmod +x /usr/bin/blurtd
apt install libncurses5

Edit the systemd unit

nano /etc/systemd/system/blurtd.service

Change it so that exec start looks like this:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/blurtd --replay --data-dir /blurt

Ctrl+o to write the changes, hit ENTER to complete the writing, Ctrl+x to exit.

Reload Daemon

systemctl daemon-reload

Start blurtd

systemctl start blurtd

Wait for chain to sync

journalctl -u blurtd -f

When you start seeing scrolling text showing blocks being produced it is synced! Example: Got 0 transactions on block 150005 by blurtplus -- Block Time Offset: -342 ms

enable your witness

Enter the cli_wallet

Replace jacobgadikian with your Blurt account name and the blog url with your own.

update_witness "jacobgadikian" "https://your-blog-url" "BRAIN_KEY_PUB_KEY_GOES_HERE" {"account_creation_fee":"10.000 BLURT","maximum_block_size":65536} true

Exit wallet with Ctrl+d

Edit the systemd unit and change back to default value

nano /etc/systemd/system/blurtd.service

Change back exec start to look like this:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/blurtd --data-dir /blurt

Ctrl+o to write the changes, hit ENTER to complete the writing, Ctrl+x to exit.

Finally check a block explorer to see that you are broadcasting the new version number.

Social Expectations

Please get to know one another. Know how to contact one another in case of an emergency. You literally operate the Blurt community. Have multiple secure ways to talk to one another in case something goes wrong.

Tox has no central servers whatsoever, is reliable, and uses public key cryptography for every aspect of its operations. Generally, I (Jacob) trust Tox more than alternatives like Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, Slack and other "secure" chat setups. I (Jacob) be making a Tox Blurt Witness group, but I strongly encourage you to have your own solutions for getting ahold of other Witnesses should the need arise.

Jacob's Tox ID is:

C3AAA8746D06C08595D3E7247D0764093A6D25B14894502F07DBBD0248C4CB391C9E6BA8E4D1

See how it's not a phone number and not a handle but instead just cryptography?

Discord - Please join our public Discord server, there is always regular discussion in the witness channels there.

Security Disclosures

If you encounter a security issue with your witness or other Blurt infrastructure, please contact [email protected] and these people individually by messaging apps of your choice:

  • Jacob Gadikian (faddat or jacobgadikian depending on platform)
  • Tuan Pham Anh (Baabeetaa)
  • Ricardo Ferreira (thecryptodrive / megadrive)

We take security very seriously and it is also no problem to publicly disclose security issues. You will not pay a social penalty for making security disclousures to the Blurt community.

Properties

account_creation_fee

This is the fee in BLURT that must be paid to create an account. This field must be non-negative.

account_subsidy_budget

The account subsidies to be added to the account subisidy per block. This is the maximum rate that accounts can be created via subsidization. The value must be between 1 and 268435455 where 10000 is one account per block.

account_subsidy_decay

The per block decay of the account subsidy pool. Must be between 64 and 4294967295 (2^32) where 68719476736 (2^36) is 100% decay per block.

Below are some example values:

Half-Life account_subsidy_decay
12 Hours 3307750
1 Day 1653890
2 Days 826952
3 Days 551302
4 Days 413477
5 Days 330782
6 Days 275652
1 Week 236273
2 Weeks 118137
3 Weeks 78757
4 Weeks 59068

A more detailed explanation of resource dynamics can be found here.

maximum_block_size

The maximum size of a single block in bytes. The value must be not less than 65536. The value must not be more than 2MB (2097152).

url

A witness published URL, usually to a post about their witness and role in the Blurt communityy. The URL must not be longer than 2048 characters.

new_signing_key

Sets the signing key for the witness, which is used to sign blocks.

Finished

Thank you so much for running blurt infrastructure. Blurt loves you!