Timekeeping

Timekeeping is an essential component of securing the protocol. Without at least one timekeeper online there would be no block production. While it is possible to run a farmer or operator node with timekeeping activated, the ideal is that a high-spec, dedicated machine is used to mitigate processing loads altering the quality of the work they do.

Having a good number of timekeepers distributed geographically is our goal to foster a healthy network. Our hope is that our dedicated community run a number in addition to those being run by the team to ensure resilience and decentralization of the protocol.

note

There is no explicit economic incentive to running a timekeeper, however, independent timekeeping contributes to stable block production, which benefits every participant of the network.

You can read more about timekeeping in the Proof-of-Time section of The Subnomicon.

Hardware Requirements

Being a timekeeper has high hardware requirements to ensure that a user with a stronger machine is not able to consistently beat every other timekeeper on the network. All timekeepers are in a race with each other to generate their proofs and we need a grid of equally provisioned F1 cars rather than a mix of classes with varying power.

Note that these specs are our starting point and are subject to change as we discover the exact characteristics required to be a good timekeeper.

Hardware	Specs
CPU	4 core+ with as high a frequency as possible. An overclocked Intel 14900k is the ideal. Note that only 1 core will be occupied with timekeeping.
RAM	8GB+
Storage	100GB SSD

Command Line Parameters

There are two new CLI options on the node visible with --help:

• --timekeeper - to become a timekeeper.
• --timekeeper-cpu-cores - to specify which cores timekeeper should use rather than random cores.