As we are coming up of the 3 year anniversary of the founding of Obyte, we have been taking stock and looking at ways to improve understanding of how the platform works in order to further increase adoption. One of the key elements of the Obyte network, which also is one of the least understood, are the 12 special nodes that provide consensus in the network, which are currently known as Witnesses.

Unfortunately, this term “Witness” does not really describe the function of these nodes, which leads to further confusion about how they work, especially because people often associate witnesses with proof-of-authority consensus. To add to the confusion, some blockchains, such as BitShares and Steem, call their block producers “witnesses”. Therefore we are considering renaming these nodes to something more descriptive which immediately indicates what they actually do.

Consensus in the network is achieved by answering the questions: What happened? And in which order? Our “Witnesses” do this by providing anchors for ordering transactions on the DAG. Therefore the term “Order Providers” seems like a good replacement for “Witnesses.” In fact, this term was first introduced by founder Tony Churyumoff in his presentation about Obyte at Decentralized in Athens at the end of October.

However, there are other possibilities for re-naming the Witness nodes. Sequence Provider, Sequencer, Orderer, Sequence Witness, Sequence Beacons, Lighthouses, Lighthouse Builders, Guiding Lights, Breadcrumb Droppers, and even Elephants are all possibilities that have come up in discussion.

Note that there should be no confusion between Witnesses and the transactions they post. The transactions of the Witnesses are used for ordering, not the Witnesses themselves (the DAG consists of transactions, not people).

Here are some possible pairs:

Also note that witness transactions serve to order the past transactions that already exist on the DAG, that’s why lighthouse based names might seem misleading.

In any case, we invite the community to share their feedback in the Telegram and Discord channels and in our future communications, we’ll use the name(s) that are better understood based on your feedback.