to my first Witness update. I have at last synchronised the blockchain and it is fully operational. You may wonder why I have a big fat Tor logo sitting here at the top of this article, well, there is a reason for this. I will be officially the first witness to provide a Tor hidden service to access some of the features of my Witness.

I have not bumped into an explanation why Witness addresses, as opposed to Seed Node addresses, should be 'hidden'. In any case the other witnesses know the IP address of your witness anyway, so it doesn't seem to me like any kind of real security, just a minor nuisance in the unlikely event someone wanted to attack your Witness node, something not yet reported anyway. So my Witness, since I am just starting out, is also seeding other nodes with blocks for syncing new Witnesses.

Personally I think it is a greatly overrated threat because unlike a server farm for a big website, the number of potential connections is far lower anyway. If someone breaks it, I can say 'I was the first!'. Now, on that note, how does account recovery work, anyway? HAHAHA!

I have installed Tor on the server and enabled a hidden service address:

rbxlpuaf3whqucgl.onion

On port 8091 at this onion address only you can reach my RPC endpoint. I am only making it available by this route to encourage interoperability for this part of the network.

I am also runnning a seed node at this address:

185.141.164.52:2001

as well as on the onion address on the same port. This is both to support the development of a bigger and thus more robust network of witnesses, and to get people looking at getting synchronised through a proxy of some kind.

To be honest I'm not sure what to do with it really but it's there so maybe there's some use case for it. Transparently integrating into anonymisation security networks would be a good thing, in my opinion, for one thing it does away with a worst case DNS failure or blocking, onion addresses are just like IP addresses for the Tor cloud. It could also help bypass attempts to suppress information getting out of some place that is in trouble. It mirrors and synchronises through the tunnels and this isn't blocked inside the country, as well as allowing new transactions outbound. It would not be for verifying transactions but maintaining the unity of the network.

It is really a very small load on a Witness server to run a Tor hidden service, it's not relaying just maintaining and rotating rendezvous connections with Tor routing nodes. It was so simple to set up when the idea popped into my head I had to immediately do it. I don't really know what use having the Seed port able to be connected to via Tor, but maybe someone can make a transparent proxy reroute just for this one port in order to allow other witnesses to connect and sync this way. I don't imagine that the traffic is that heavy anyway, since of course it's not that often that people are ginnying up themselves a new witness.

It would be pretty cool if steemd could be set to also parse onion addresses and correctly pass into a socks port to tunnel to these addresses. (hint). Just throwing ideas out there, but now if you are curious you can experiment with syncing a node with Tor, as well as connecting apps to the witness.

Next witness-category post will include:

I will be putting together an up to date howto in the next day or so, to share what I learned as regards to gotchas... The account_history plugin should be disabled when you are replaying, it seems, for example.

l0k1 for Prez

So, of course I want you all to vote for me. But I also feel that I should keep this thing working for a while and get a bit more familiar with my newly assigned possible job/internship position. I have been reliably informed that once my Witness gets the once or so a day lucky dip block job to do (fingers crossed it does it well) then you will be able to type l0k1 into the https://steemit.com/~witnesses text entry box below the leaderboard.

I will be checking this periodically to see so I know I can confirm to my readers that they can now vote for me. I doubt that I will race into the top 19 anyway, nobody does. By the time I am sure I have got the job figured out I'll be ready for the voteflood :)

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We can't code here! This is Whale country!

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