[Signer Voting] TomJoad

I would like to put my name forward as the first signer on B&C Exchange for Bitcoin, Nu, and B&C Exchange blockchains. I will support all other assets as they are added by shareholders.

I plan on running an anonymous VPS service for maximum up-time and reliability and am in the process of researching best options. I also pledge to create at least five encrypted backups of each blockchain signer wallet on various physical and cloud storage platforms.

For B&C Exchange to be competitive and profitable, it must keep its signer costs low, and one way to accomplish this is by requiring fewer signers. My hope is that by acting as a signer we can reduce the number of signatories required, as I have developed an honest reputation within this community.

For those who don’t know me, I have been involved as a Nu and B&C team member since 2014 under various public and private pseudonyms. Samples of my work and motions are throughout this forum, including as a contributor to the B&C Exchange whitepaper.

I have been trusted with significant funds already in this community through my coordination of NSR buybacks, as well as several BKS escrow transactions among private community members in excess of $10,000 US.

Voting is not yet enabled, but if you support my candidacy I would appreciate a brief message below. Or, if you have concerns, I will try to address them.

11 Likes

Candidate supported!

Your involvement will enrich the process for sure.

You would sign on any coin shareholders put on the exchange?

@tomjoad would you link your forum ID to a BKS address? If not, how can we tell which address is yours?

But I don’t think it’s a good idea to link ID to address, we prefer anonymity, don’t we?

Once B&C Exchange has upgraded to 4.0, and reputation voting has begun, I will publish a BlockShares public key to use as my reputed signer identity.

6 posts were split to a new topic: What is the ideal hardware configuration to become a B&C reputed signer?

As B&C signers are mostly keepers of rubberstamp robots, quite unlike FLOT members who are required to make decisions. So what differenciate signer A and signer B is how secure they are, how fast they sign, and how much they charge for themselves IMO.

I think that signers who are selecting their server from similar kind of server providers are facing similarly levels of security risk and the risk is low due to the nature of multisig – you can’t do much if you get hold of one key.

I am not sure how the speed of a signer’s signing related to B&C’s performance. As the transaction confimation time is the coins’ native confirmation time (~10 minutes for BTC and 1 minute for NBT etc.), I don’t know if signer A signs in 1 second and signer B signs in 0.5 second, users can feel the difference – could Charlie using A miss a trade to Dave using B, or it;s just that Charlie will have his trade confirm 0.5 seconds slower than Dave? In any case if speed is an issue signers can just buy a faster server to compete with other signers in this aspect. In the end all signers may have the same kind of performance.

Signers charge fees. To stay competitive signers will offer lower fees. Because except for the recurring server cost, the cost to be a signer is initial setup time and not much else. So my guess is that competition will drive down signer fees until the profit is very low.

I might missed other quality metrics of a signer, e.g. how often the key is updated etc.

edit: I see the thread is splitted. maybe this post should go to a thread called “Quality of a B&C signer”

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What is the difference between a nubot operator and a signer? workload wise.

Sort of. Signers can’t set their fees like FLOT members do. They get paid through a second block reward in proportion to their reputation. The amount of that second block reward is configurable through shareholder voting.

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Update: I’ve researched several hosting options and am confident I’ve arrived at one that will allow me to sign for all assets on B&C Exchange. Once voting starts I will post a BlockShares public key to use as my reputed signer identity.

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Would you mind sharing your experience and the results of your research?

An important aspect of being a signer will be to not reveal specific hosting providers used, so I won’t comment on that.

If using a VPS, I think the best route will be to sign up using a pseudonym and run a Linux server with full-disk encryption. That way, even in the event that a thief identifies your server and attempts physical access, a restart will be required (which the full-disk encryption will protect). While using a VNC to access the VPS, a VPN and Tor should be used to add additional protection to the data coming in and out of the server.

If using a physical “trading box”, full-disk encryption and VPN/Tor should be used.

I’m far from an expert on these matters, so I’m looking forward to following the ideal hardware requirements thread for best practice suggestions.

3 Likes

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I didn’t expect to find the name of the provider, because of the reasons you named :wink:
But you seem to have found a provider with decent hard disk space - Bitcoin alone requires over 70 GB.

What were the requirements you were trying to meet?
150 GB HDD or more?
4 GB RAM or more?
CPU minimum specs?

I think the rest of the attributes is of lesser importance, but I might err.

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I think every signer will have to make that determination on their own, depending on what they’re trying to accomplish. Giving anything more specific isn’t something I’m comfortable with for identification purposes. Certainly though, CPU, RAM and disk space should be high priorities.

@tomjoad, now that B&C’s protocol has finally switched, we need to know if you are still moving forward with this. Do you still plan on becoming a reputed signer? You have talked about your current position with Nu, but not B&C Exchange, which is apparently still being developed by @Eleven. He has continued working on the trading features according to @cryptog , so it’s only a matter of time before it’s finished and can go live. We need trusted signers, so it would be helpful if you edited the first post to include your address for voting.

If not, is there a reason why you have decided against it? As far as I’m concerned B&C still has a viable business model. The only main difference is that it doesn’t have the backing of Nu anymore and will have to find another stable currency, unless NuBits returns to $1. Will you put your name forth for reputed signer voting?

I am afraid that Sigmike will not work together with eleven.
@sigmike would you please explain the situation of B&C dev team? How many of them, who are they, who do you believe capable to contunue this task, how much money&time do you need to finish B&C?

Why is this, because of the issue with voting opt-out not being done correctly? This quote sounds like he is willing to work with him to me.

@sigmike, are you currently coordinating with @Eleven to make sure the trading features are being coded correctly, or do you not have any knowledge of what he’s working on? It would be great if you could oversee his work to make sure it is of quality.

Answers to these questions would be great as well, so we can prepare appropriate motions in order to move forward…

Sigmike knows there are lots of decision making, so he quickly released v5.0 so that we can elect some signers to discuss the next step.

Now, it seems there are no developers working on B&C.

Whether Sigmike accept eleven as a developer is unknow, and this issue is also the topic of discussion.

B&C shareholders, waiting for death is meaningless, just move on!

So the question is whether Sigmike considers Eleven a B&C developer and if he will accept his work on the trading functions?

The discussion result between sigmike and signers may be that eleven will be fired or hired.