Today's episode is all about broadcasting our intent to become a witness - in both community and blockchain terms.

Let's WITNESS UP!

Witness campaign post

In order for people to be able to direct their precious witness votes to us, we need to send a special broadcast onto the network. As part of this broadcast, we're required to include a link to our witness campaign post, so let's do that first.

Log into Steemit as your witness account, and write an explanation of your intentions for your witness. Examples of other witness campaign posts can be seen here.

The witness campaign post can be posted to either your main account, or posted as your witness account.

Here's our SteemWOW campaign post!

Take the oath!

Once the campaign post is created, we're ready to complete the blockchain part of witness activation: Broadcasting to the network our intent to become a witness.

In order to make this broadcast, we need to enable another couple of Steem node plugins.

Log into the server over SSH as usual, then stop the Steem node:

./stopsteem.sh

Edit the Steem node config:

nano /steemdata/config.ini

Find the line plugin = witness and change it to:

plugin = witness condenser_api network_broadcast_api

Save and quit nano (I'm sure you remember how to do that by now!) then restart Steem:

./startsteem.sh

Feel free to use our Steem log viewer to check it came up okay. Then, start the wallet interface:

./wallet.sh

Unlock the wallet with your wallet password:

unlock "YOUR_WALLET_PASS"

Now, we'll craft the update_witness command ready to paste into the wallet interface.

The structure of this command looks like this:

update_witness "WITNESS_NAME" "CAMPAIGN_POST_LINK" "WITNESS_PUBKEY" {"account_creation_fee":"3.370 STEEM","maximum_block_size":65536,"sbd_interest_rate":0} true

There are 3 things that you need to replace:

• WITNESS_NAME: The Steem account of the witness
• CAMPAIGN_POST_LINK: The full URL of your witness campaign post
• WITNESS_PUBKEY: The pub_key field of the witness signing keypair we generated last time.

The final 3 values, for account_create_fee, maximum_block_size, and sbd_interest_rate, I have lifted from the consensus values currently provided by the top witnesses.

Here's what my final command looks like:

update_witness "steemwow" "https://steemit.com/witness/@steemwow/steemwow-witness-campaign-post" "STM6SEAC4DpnTyJ5de7qcvpR5UjxMVsE2wfnwwqLzCAGxcDqENYPw" {"account_creation_fee":"3.370 STEEM","maximum_block_size":65536,"sbd_interest_rate":0} true

When you've assembled the command, paste it into the wallet, and if all goes well, the wallet will show the witness creation transaction that it broadcast:

You're now a witness!

You can Ctrl-D to exist the wallet again.

The End?

No! As mentioned in Part 8, we need to set up an automated price data feed to help the blockchain achieve price consensus in a decentralised way.

We'll do that next time :)

Vote for SteemWOW!

@chriddi and @steemit.contest kindly asked during the Zero to Witness when they'd be able to vote for us; the answer is now!

We'd be very glad if you would support us by casting a witness vote for SteemWOW.

Simply go to the Steemit Wallet Witness list, scroll to the bottom, and fill in the form:

Series Index

Part 1: We need a big computer!
Part 2: Connecting to the server
Part 3: Securing the server (see also Passwords: A Rant)
Part 4: Enabling certificate authentication
Part 5: Downloading the blockchain
Part 6: Unpacking the blockchain and configuring Steem
Part 7: Starting and syncing Steem
Part 8: Witness responsibilities
Part 9: Generating witness keys