If you have come this far, it is because you are interested in being part of the network of witnesses that support the CREA network and our dapp Creary. Bravo! You are in the right place. Here you will find step by step all the necessary indications to become an elected witness in this consensus protocol. You can know the list of witnesses that operate on the network in the following links.
https://creascan.net/witnesses
https://creary.net/~witness
In CREA the production of blocks takes place in rounds. In each round, 25 witnesses (nodes) are selected by direct democracy thanks to the vote of the users of the network. The main objective of the witnesses is to create and sign blocks of transactions. Twenty-four of these witnesses are chosen by voting and the number 25 is selected from among all those witnesses that did not rank among the first 24. The 25 active witnesses are changed in each round to prevent any witness from constantly ignoring the blocks produced by the same witness placed in a previous position. The protocol distributes to the witnesses 15% of the total of the rewards issued annually.
What does it mean to be a witness of the network?
A witness is something very important for Creary. A witness represents all those users of the CREA network who have deposited their vote and confidence to represent them.
Being trustworthy is the first norm that a witness must comply with in order for the community to vote for him. For this reason, a witness must ensure that his server is always operational and never fails.
A witness must love his task and keep up to date with the latest developments and implementations that are proposed for the CREA network in order to update his node and be prepared for a possible update in the network.
A witness must have knowledge of command-line, know how to manage the configuration and maintenance of a server. If you are not familiar with these tasks, it may become complicated for you. But do not worry, if at some step of the tutorial you feel lost or have any questions, you can find help from the community on the #witnesses channel on Discord.
Similar to a crowdfunding, witnesses can also ask for a vote from the community to finance a development that has a collective return. For example, a DAPP or any initiative or open source tool that provides an improvement to the ecosystem of CREA. For this it is convenient to provide a link to the project so that the community can evaluate the initiative before voting for the witness that promotes it.