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I was just wondering. Looking at mytezosbaker webpage, there are so many great bakers which provide delegation services, right.

1) So I was interested in knowing: How do those services achieve that? How can one be a baker? What are technical (hardware/software) & financial &other requirements?

2) And is the financial ROI reward identical in percentage for bakers and for those who delegate their XTZ to bakers? Or do bakers receive higher annual rewards (what is the formula for bakers?)?

3) And finally, must a baker be always online, what if not? What impact has the online-uptime on your baking rewards ?

Is there a clear-written guide available about baking somewhere ?

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  • Welcome to Tezos Stack Exchange (TSE)! We are very happy to see the amount of interest you are displaying with regard to Tezos and baking in particular. However please be mindful that TSE is a Q&A site where we aim for questions to be focused. As it stands your question covers many different aspects and is too broad. Could you please review your question, perhaps break it in several separate questions so that people can answer to each separately in a clear fashion ? Also please first have a look whether some of your questions are already answered somewhere here on TSE
    – Ezy
    Mar 21, 2019 at 0:56

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1) You become a baker by running a Tezos node and registering as a delegate. The financial requirement is currently 10.000 XTZ (although this might get lowered to 8.000 XTZ if the current Athens A proposal is ratified). Hardware requirements are minimum 1 medium sized server with quite a bit of disk space and preferrable a SSD disk (tezos is quite disk I/O intensive).

2) Bakers take a fee from it's delegators, typically 10-15%. So if you delegate to someone else you get 85% of your possible rewards. If you bake yourself you get 100% + 15% or whatever is delegated to your baker. NB! As a baker you have to "manually" pay your delegators (software exists - but it's not a builtin automated process).

3) You get assigned slots to bake and endorse. If you are not online at the time of your slots you loose those rewards. So yes, keep your baker always online. There is no "penalty" other than lost rewards and perhaps lower stats on mytezosbaker.com for missing slots. Beware of double-baking however, that will cost you a severe penalty.

There are many excellent guides and articles out there.

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  • @asbjornenge awesome reply. I got followups: , 1) "Beware of double-baking however, that will cost you a severe penalty." -Can you provide a precise explanation (or a outside source) how someone could end up double baking (not on purpose)? And how to prevent it? , 2) "You get assigned slots to bake and endorse. If you are not online at the time of your slots" - can a baker know/forecast the time of her next slot (how)? , 3) "medium sized server with quite a bit of disk space" - Can you give better details, concrete example of a possible hardware set (link to amazon e.g.)?
    – johnsmiththelird
    Mar 22, 2019 at 14:31
  • @johnsmiththelird 1. Double baking by accident can happen if your have an operations incident where the baker crashes and upon restart it tries to send a signed block for the same heights etc. Ledger Nano S and other HSM solutions have protection agains this - where the device will noe sign the same block twice: 2. Yes, slots are assigned in a "snapshot" 7 cycles into the future. medium.com/cryptium/… 3. 1 CPU, 3GB ram and 500 GB ssd shoud do it 👍
    – asbjornenge
    Mar 23, 2019 at 11:04
  • @asbjornenge , thx. two followups: 1. ok but how to prevent it with other wallets? , 2. so, when you said "Not being online is risky" bc u could miss your "slots" -> since i can forecast my NEXT slot, I can just stay offline UNTIL my next slot time comes up, right? I just want to know-can i be offline and then only come online to bake and then go offline again? thx
    – johnsmiththelird
    Mar 23, 2019 at 14:41
  • @johnsmiththelird 1. Identities generated by the nodes does not have this protection. Afaik options are ledger or one of the cloud hsm ref. github.com/tacoinfra/remote-signer 2. Your node needs to be in sync before it can bake, so you cannot just pop online at the last minute. Aim for 100% uptime, and do any required downtime maintenance when you have no baking slots, but come online in good time so your node is in sync before it's your turn 👍
    – asbjornenge
    Mar 24, 2019 at 9:16
  • @asbjornenge , great all clear. one last followup please: "since i can forecast my NEXT slot" -> Can you explain how exactly I can predict my next time slot, in practical terms- what is the calculation method to get as a result for example XX-hours/days, or block-level## ?
    – johnsmiththelird
    Mar 24, 2019 at 18:35

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