Hive Engine launches witness p2p layer in 12 hours
Hive Engine has been working on a p2p layer (witnesses) for a while to minimize the centralization factor of Hive Engine.
If you look at the market cap of the top coins, this is certainly a good thing.
Decentralization to the rescue
The centralization of Hive Engine has always been a concern of mine, and I am happy to see this become a reality.
This post answers some of the questions about the changes.
How many top witnesses will there be?
There are will be 6 top witnesses and backups. Similar to Hive but instead of 20 they are using 6. This change will hopefully make any attempts to cheat on Hive Engine extremely difficult, preferably impossible.
Witnesses are elected by WORKERBEE stake holders. You can get a feel for who will be responsible for choosing witnesses by looking at the rich list of WORKERBEE.
100K BEE (currently 0.59 Hive) per year will be used as an incentive to run a witness on Hive-Engine. This comes out to around 1,150 BEE (or less depending on the distribution to back up witnesses) a month for a top Hive-Engine witness, or about 684 Hive (~$98 USD).
This is based on BEE price holding up, my gut feeling is it will not based on a few things, there have been some recent large sells dropping the price from ~.9 all the way down to ~.12. It has yet to recover hovering around .6 at this time. I suspect the expected value will be significantly less due to thin market, lack of use cases for BEE, and additional sell pressure. The primary use case (that I know of) is tribes, which there are not many being created at this point.
If the market falls out again, you could be looking at around 138 Hive or ~$20 USD/month if the price sinks back down to .12. This is assuming you are one of the top 6 and remain so for the full month, even then there is a chance you will not cover hardware expenses after a month or so.
To run a witness, you need a server with at least 2 CPU, 2 GB ram (preferably 4), and 50GB of disk space. This will typically cost around $20-30 USD/month on most reputable providers. A little less if you really shop around.
Witness contracts go live on Hive Engine at Feb 3, 01:00:00 UTC. Witness scheduling will not be enabled until block 51022551, a full 24 hours later, if enough witnesses are running.
I'm going to guess there will be a lot of people stepping up to run a witness. The directions on how to do so can be found here.
Image Sources: 1
Why you should vote me as witness
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The only thing holding me back, for now, is a Linux server. Will this increase demand for Workerbee though?
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I don't see people buying up WORKERBEE to vote on witnesses, much the same I don't see people buying up HIVE to vote for witnesses either.
The only time I really have seen a governance token spike is with UNI, but there are other factors in play.
In fact, I expect the opposite as witnesses will create more sell pressure on BEE and less ROI on WORKERBEE. WORKERBEE is already one of the longest time to break-even of all the miners.
Since many people already own WORKERBEE, it is a value add, but I don't see people running to stake up WORKERBEE.
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Oh yeah, I get it. So what's the incentive for running a witness server?
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Earning BEE and helping decentralize Hive-Engine.
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I see. is it the same concept behind running a Hive witness server?
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Yes.
Thank you for sharing.
I was wondering how easy/possible it was for current Hive witnesses to jump on HE witness.
Specs are less demanding for HE witness so far, does it mean the same machine can be used for both ? or it would impact Hive witness performance ?
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It would be pretty easy for any current Hive witness to become a Hive-Engine witness. I would not recommend running it on the same hardware though for security reasons not performance.
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It nice to see hive-engine follow the decentralisation route. Many have expressed their concerns about how centralized it is. Maybe this news can engender people's confidence in buying hive-engine tokens
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Step in the right direction
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What do you think the kind of traffic would be to a server like that? I have a spare server that I have been thinking about turning into some kind of node, but I need to be careful about the amount of outside traffic that is coming and going to the server. I think my ISP would frown on too much outside traffic happening.
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Not entirely sure, certainly less than a Hive Witness node (~250GB/month).
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Okay thanks! If you end up spinning one up, I'd love to see some stats after a week or so. Like I said, I have spare servers just sitting around and not a ton of oversight, but if my ISP starts seeing a ton of traffic hitting one specific internal IP, I might not be able to explain it.
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I enabled traffic monitoring on mine(currently a top 6 witness for engine so this should be maximum usage as long as you close the rpc port) and once the validation part starts(Around Feb 4 1 am UTC), I'll let you know what numbers I get. If you don't hear from me in about 24 hours from then, I probably forgot and just comment on this to ping me.
Alright, sounds good! Thanks.
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I know it hasn't been a full day but there should be enough info to get all the info. Vnstat is pretty good with its estimates and it says about 800 MB/day and that seems about right if we use the average rate as staying constant. This is on a server with just the witness(though I do have my rpc port open). Nothing else going on.
If you are concerned about data usage, definitely turn off the RPC port. While normal usage for it shouldn't be too high, if used for purposes like we(NFTMart) use ours, the data usage on it could be immense. (Default port is 5000 for RPC, 5001 for P2P). An extra 30 GB of data shouldn't be too much in most scenarios but you know your situation best.
Here's our RPC. Almost all of the usage is onto our own services and so I didn't care about writing efficient code for that part that would use the least amount of data, just getting it done :)
Hmm, okay. That is definitely something to think about.
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I'm already spinning my HE witness node. As a tribe owner I feel like Hive-Engine doing this was a much-needed step in the right direction indeed.
I agree, the lack of p2p decentralization was a big issue for me.
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This is good news; hopefully we move to a more distributed 'less for profit' community 2nd layer system soon.