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Prevent users from staking on machines that cannot calculate proofs in time

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
go
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start by tracing the staking endpoint and the rchash calculation result, including how its duration is stored and returned. Then determine how an override could fit the staking call and how to report an informative failure. Done means staking checks the calculation timing, users can explicitly override the check, and rchash results explain whether the timing meets the lottery requirement.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Summary

Some machines are too slow to calculate proofs required for storage incentive lottery, in time. In that case, although they are properly staking and might have all the data, they are failing to participate fruitfully in the lottery.

There is a way to check the performance of the machines, as described in docs with rchash. But user's might not know they can/should do that. Either they miss it in the docs, or they are using some other method of installation (e.g. DAppNode).

The proposed new feature would be to required the users to run at least one rchash calculation on a fully synced node as a prerequisite, before being allowed to stake. Which could be overridden by the users, allowing them to stake even if thi prerequisite is not met.

Motivation

A user might run a full staking Bee node, investing time and resources (stake, electricity, hardware, time) and not winning anything, while not even knowing why - that their resources might be insufficient (CPU speed, storage speed).

Implementation

A full Bee node already knows what the result of last rchash calculation was - how long it took to calculate:
image

The same, or another field, could be used to store the duration of a rchash calculation. Whichever field is used, its value should be retrieved when a staking call is executed, and if the duration is too long, the staking should fail with an informative message, that the machine would probably not be able to play the lottery. If there is no information in the field, the staking should fail, with an informative message, instructing the user to run rchash.

The user can call the staking endpoint with a special argument, overriding the above mentioned check of rchash duration.

Also, when running rchash call, the returned information should also include a user friendly field, explicitly stating that the calculation was done in required time needed to play in the lottery (perhaps this specific field could be referenced by the logic allowing staking).

Drawbacks

It could affect the onboarding UX negatively, esp. if done improperly - if stopping the user in the onboarding process without proper explanation.

Dominant language
Go
Stars
1.5k
Forks
390
Avg merge
2d 11h
Merged PRs (30d)
23

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First steps

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  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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