The Reports from the Witnesses 2018-05-20

lux-witness (60) 6 years ago

Thanks for the report. As a very new witness (2 weeks and still no block to sign) may I take advantage and ask a few questions?

on steemian.info some witnesses are striken-through red and the data provided tends to show that their servers are not up and running anymore. They are "dead witnesses" (the mob got them, probably ;-) )

Notice for instance: adamm, resteemable, geoffrey, lafona, gingerninja. They are in various stages of putrefaction - for instance lafona hasn't minted a block in the past 18125 hours which is 755 days or more than 2 years ... His last minted block was below block 1 000 000. His bones can only be identified through DNA analysis

on https://steem.bitcoiner.me/schedule/?c=show200,showabstime on the other hand, they appear in the schedule, patiently waiting in line for a future block (and, I suspect, eating up slots for all those lined down behind them)

Can you maybe help me make sense of this situation ?

Are these long-deceased servers really still considered for block signing
as hinted at by steem.bitcoiner.me or is it just a presentation issue ?
If yes and they "miss the block", as is expected, I suspect a new round of the first 20 starts, is it correct ? That would seriously delay the time before a witness waiting behind the squeletons gets to sign a block, right?
Is this a desirable situation ?

For me it looks like a security weakness of the current implementation: one could imagine a witness in the first 20 creating "decoys", witnesses that only sign a block or two and then are stopped. Based on the 30 votes available, and people's inertia and disinterest the "decoys" would remain there to eat up slots in the schedule and thus increase the frequency at which the first 20 witnesses get to sign blocks. Is that interpretation correct ?

Thanks in advance

$0.24

pjau (63) 6 years ago

They are not eating up slots. They are not alive, look at their signing keys.

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lux-witness (60) 6 years ago

Thanks,

then how should this schedule be interpreted:

Let's say (189) lafona moves from position [58] up to position [1] (among "backup witnesses" where busy.witness appears in the snapshot below:

Then what happens at the next round, is lafona picked to appear as the 21st / backup witness in the current round as we see here busy.witness appearing about 40 seconds later ?

Or is a dead witness skipped and if it's skipped, how, by what mechanism, which part in the code looks at what parameter in order to decide whether to include or not to include lafona, geoffrey, adamm in the next round ?

And if it skips these dead-witnesses and does not include them in a round, I would also like to make sure that that part of the code doesn't also skip new witnesses (such as lux-witness) just as it skips the dead witnesses.

Many thanks for your patience

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pjau (63) 6 years ago

To be honest I wouldn't even worry about what position you are, it changes, you move up and down. That queue scheduler website thing makes zero sense to me.

But with the amount of MV you have, you will get about 5 blocks a month currently. I calculated it to be roughly 1 block a month per 31 MV you have (if outside the top 20).

But in answer to your question, I have no clue how the code controls it. As long as its working, does it really matter :p

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sorin.cristescu (71) 6 years ago (edited)

:-) Thank you for your answer.

In my case I'm not in the "witness business" for the rewards but in order to learn and reuse the chainbase / steem code for other blockchain projects. Therefore in my case it matters A LOT ! :-) That is precisely why I started a witness, to understand how it works !

When you write "look at their signing keys", where do you see those ? I didn't manage to see what you are looking at exactly.

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thekitchenfairy (71) 6 years ago (edited)

Steemd, steemworld

Signing keys that are stm1111111111111

They arent active witnesses

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sorin.cristescu (71) 6 years ago

Oh, indeed, cool, thanks, got it !

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pjau (63) 6 years ago

Fair enough, I'm not in it for the reward either, I just like being apart of it. Gives me something to do :p

But any way, I hope someone can answer. Because I certainly have no idea :)

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mumin007 (53) 6 years ago

Its a difficult task to perform, thanks for your effort. This really is a useful data

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sistem (60) 6 years ago

Well it's a nice thing that you get to assemble all these wonderful reports into one piece and then we can get to read from anyone we wanna keep a tab on. I have gone through some and I must say that some of them can only be understood by programmers . So detailed and technical. Lolz

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snook (70) 6 years ago

You are very welcome!

thekitchenfairy (71) 6 years ago

Thank you for including mine!

topstoriez (50) 6 years ago

Great work @timcliff
Really you do such a hard work.
Its not easy to get data from each and every witness . but you do . so i appreciate your hard work .
Keep it up . its very useful too . thank you for such an amazing work

olumideolowoyeye (65) 6 years ago

You see every week you do this, you keep us updated with what is happening at the witness corner. You’re really much appreciated for this cause believe me knowing what’s happening with our witnesses is thoughtful of you to initiate. You’re much appreciated