Next steps
The first minutes and hours in your node's life
As soon as the witnet_node
container is up, it will do the following things in order:
Try to open connections to other nodes in the network. It needs 8 "outbound" connections. This should take from several seconds to a few minutes.
Discover what is the tip of the block chain, and download all the blocks from that chain. This can take from several minutes to several hours. The synchronization time depends heavily on how long the block chain is, but also on your Internet bandwidth, CPU speed, memory size and speed, and storage drive write throughput.
Go into Synced status. In Synced status, your node will validate transactions and blocks in real time, and it will try itself to propose block candidates and participate in resolving data requests.
What to expect from your node's balance and reputation
Getting your first block proposal accepted by the network and minting your first wit tokens is not easy, and can take from a few days up to some weeks due to the probabilistic nature of the cryptographic sortition algorithm that rules the system.
As with minting blocks, being assigned a request for the first time can take some time. Once you have mined one block or resolved at least one request, your node will earn reputation and it will start getting assignments more often.
Stake some WIT tokens to increase your node's probability of mining
The most efficient way to increase your node's probability of mining is to deposit some WIT tokens into its address.
In doing so, your node will be able to start participating in resolving data requests, which allows it to earn reputation points and join the Active Reputation Set (ARS) — a list of nodes that have recently proved their reliability.
This is crucial to increasing the mining probability because the network prioritizes blocks from identities with reputation or belonging to the ARS.
Once you transfer some amount of WIT tokens to your node, staking starts to happen automatically after 7 days.
Monitoring your node's progress
nodeStats
Among other information, this shows the synchronization state of your node, as well as counters for proposed and accepted blocks and participations in resolving data requests ("commitments").
balance
The balance
command will print your node's current balance.
reputation
The reputation
command will print your node's current reputation score.
Check ports and incoming connections
The final check to verify that your port is correctly forwarded is using the peers
method to look if any of the peer connections is tagged as inbound:
Back up your private master key
Doing a backup of the private master key of your node is a great way to keep your Wit coins safe.
Export
This command will print your master key into your console terminal:
You can also add the --write
flag to write a backup of your master key into a file in the configuration directory of your node (~/.witnet/config
by default):
It is recommended to move or copy the resulting file into a safe place. Writing it into a piece of paper and keeping it somewhere safe from light, water, fire (and eyes 👀) is the best option.
Please keep the exported key totally secret. Anyone with knowledge of this key has full access to all your Wit coins.
Import
Importing master keys is only allowed when creating a new node, as overwriting a existing key could be dangerous. The process is quite simple:
Never use the same master key on multiple nodes at once. You may find your nodes exposed to double-spend issues and severe slashing.
Customize the configuration if needed
A custom witnet.toml
configuration file can be used to adjust some parameters of the node. The default configuration file itself contains detailed explanations for each parameter.
If you created your node following this guide, your witnet.toml
file will be found in the ~/.witnet/config
folder, right in your user's directory.
You can easily edit the configuration file like this:
Upgrade your Witnet node
Upgrading is as easy as it gets:
1. Remove the old container
2. Pull the latest version of the Docker image
3. Recreate the container using the latest Docker image
Voilà! Your Witnet node is now upgraded. Your master key is safe and your addresses will be the same. Remember that you can always double-check the Witnet version that you are running with this command:
Long term maintenance of your node
There are some operations that are recommended from time to time to make sure your node is in perfect order:
Give a look to the result of the
nodeStats
,balance
andreputation
commands.Check that you are getting incoming connections as explained above.
Restart your node once in a while (e.g.
docker restart witnet_node
) so that the node can perform some housekeeping operations. This helps reducing memory footprint and optimize disk space.
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