A New Witness Is Live

I am very happy to announce that I have started a witness which is now live. I was thinking about doing this for years but I didn't want to use any hosting company because they can give us the illusion of having nodes around the world but then those can be quickly taken down (or worse, taken over) in one go. Then some time ago Hive account@gtg published this post to which Hive account@themarkymark made this follow-up. Thank you guys for the inspiration. This is exactly what I was looking for - some small hardware that will do the job yet has super low power consumption. You know, blockchain tech doesn't need to use up all this vast energy.

The Hardware

Beelink Mini PC S12 that comes with:
Intel Alder Lake-N100
16GB DDR4 RAM
500GB NVMe

I picked it up brand new from ebay for $189.
500GB storage is not enough for a hived node so I also got a second-hand 1TB NVMe from someone locally for $60.

Here it is:

The Software

Windows. Haha, just kidding. The Beelink came with it preinstalled though, but luckily all traces of it were gone when I replaced the disk with the 1TB NVMe one.

So now we have:
Ubuntu 22.04
hived 1.27.6 synced from scratch. Yes, I opted to sync from scratch on this machine. It takes some time but it's not the end of the world.

Now that syncing is done, this is using about 10-15% of the CPU.

Power & Internet backup

Hosting at home has its challenges, the two main ones seem to be the possibility of power and internet connectivity outages. Either of those would reduce the reliability of the node. For the first one, I looked at a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) device but there are some small but consistent reports that they catch fire, and I don't want to take any chances with that. I keep looking for alternatives. Where my device is there are very rare power outages (once every few years) so hopefully that will remain the case, but having a backup will be even better.

For internet connectivity, I've recently been using a 4G router and am very happy with it. You plug in a SIM card that has an internet plan and it connects to the 4G network - then you can connect the router to your device via a cable. This allows for some pretty nice redundancy - you can have your regular internet cable coming into your router, and also your SIM card, so you can have fiber optic + 4G. It seems extremely rare that both will be down. In practice though, it may or may not be an overkill (depending on your situation), since I have barely ever seen the 4G network here to be down.

Values as a witness

It kind of feels like there is a place for such a section. My core interest is in decentralization and running my own witness with my own hardware is hopefully a small contribution to that. If anyone else is inspired to do this, you are welcome to contact me for any help.

I want to see this place thrive while at the same time keeping the core principles of being accessible to people - both in terms of cost of transactions and in terms of ease of use. I want others to be able to benefit from the myriad of wonderful things that I benefit from by participating in the Hive network.