has been a bit of a struggle getting my map of priorities worked out, but I think I have straightened it out now.

Witness Server Status

I was able to decrease unnecessary capabilities on the first VPS to 3 cores, reduced the bandwidth to 8Tb, left it at 16Gb RAM, and with the credit, I got a 2Gb 2 core 40Gb server with 4Tb, so now I can separate my services properly, as well as a domain name for just one address on this new webserver that explains the services, that live on a hidden service I am building.

The witness is running without plugins, and should now be synchronised and operational, I will stop it briefly to back up the drive, and configure logging to file, and snapshot it so it can restart easier later if it breaks. I will set it to do this daily.

I am planning to write a script that syncs the log file to my PC, and it will pop a notification when it fails, and later a log file monitor on the server, and one on my webserver, that sends an email when the log is not written to for more than about 2 minutes. So I will know if it dies and I plan to get phone credit and be able to receive alerts anywhere.

Apart from this, now the Witness is standalone. It should be more than capable of handling top 19 duty, and except for hard forks it will run and I will ensure it is never down for more than an hour or two.

I will be also of course providing Seed Node access, as I don't believe there is any practical security in hiding the Witness IP, and Witnesses need seeds to catch up after downtime, which is inevitable sometimes, so it is just sportsmanly 😁. Well, we all want fast transactions! To use my Seed node use the following address:

185.141.164.52:2001

With my new domain projectinception.lt I have created a subdomain witness.projectinception.lt which you can also use thus:

witness.projectinception.lt:2001

I have restricted it currently to 3 connections at once but I may raise this in future. I have bandwidth to burn on the server, I just don't want it to get enough load that syncing other nodes clogs up the channel for the Witness function. I figure this is a safe amount of connections to allow that won't permit so much traffic that it causes a problem, while assisting my fellow Witnesses stay up to date when their node glitches.

Project Inception

The web server is for my first project, which is about privacy services. I gave it this name because of how in the movie they operate dream avatars that can operate dream avatars, and as it goes in the story, they use this to change someone's mind and make it seem as though it was always the person's idea.

How it relates is that privacy systems in distributed systems work via multiple shells, for routing is the onion, for money is a tumbler, which bounces money around to hide where it is going, and the account is also a shell.

Technically it is all "pseudo" but in mathematics, networks and topology, a few layers of muddling is enough, and better random numbers can be made, even if true randomness does not exist. In practice, it is "computationally infeasible" to break the codes.

The Sybil Workshop

First service I am developing is a Tor enabled Steem account broker. This is to enable new, untraceable accounts to be made, which do have negative applications, but also positive and protective. Anonymous reporters, leakers and activists have uses for these.

This will simply be selling accounts created by paying the network fee, plus a markup for providing it in this manner, maybe 20%. It will be a pure HTML site and I will provide a html page separately to download, that contains a form that calculates public and other private subkeys according to Steem specifications.

The script in a html is simply the most universal script platform all users can access, and users can read the script (it will be in human readable line structure), and from this script's output, they get the owner public key which I believe is what you give to the API call to buy an account, this is how key (password) change operations work also.

This ensures you can trust that I have no avenue for hijacking your new account.

The Inception Shell

The next planned feature is an onion proxy for RPC queries. It is just a gateway, and will make new connections via one of the RPC endpoint clusters that are in use. This will be a service to users seeking to fully anonymise their access to the blockchain, ideally later on many RPC nodes have a hidden service and it becomes just an option to use Tor in clients.

The Steem Laundry

This will be developed after the Sybil Workshop is finished, because I need about 9 accounts to create a tumbler.

To use it, on the hidden website you set a recipient, depth and time window for the operation, and it gives a code that activates it when you send a memo with a payment to one of the nodes. Ideally multiple parties use this at once, the more, the greater the security against correlating senders and receivers.

When one of the tumbler accounts receives a payment with a code, the process is activated and the schedule is generated, and after completion, purged. The payments are then routed through their random pattern, and at the other end, minus a random sized fee limited at 1% your payment arrives, in randomly sized and timed payments.

To increase security I could also have a background tumbling that keeps activity between the nodes even when no payments are scheduled. Nothing excessive, maybe a couple of transactions an hour on the cluster.

Final Comments

So, I am now up and running as a witness and in a few days you all can start voting for me.

I will be maybe less frequently posting for the period I am in development for these projects, but as I make milestones I will make a report.

Update

I had a small glitch this morning trying to run a backup on the server through the host's interface, a couple of hours down, but after that was done, I just made a snapshot of the root using btrfs, with the witness off, and then started it up, configuring the logging and automatic start at boot, and for now it is online and it turns out, I can just ssh witness "tail -f /path/to/log" and it appears on a local console, so I can quickly see the state of it (server is connected, witness is running).

I am in the process now of getting the website infrastructure set up.

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