BakeChain can make solo-baking a breeze, allowing almost anyone the ease of setting up and running their own home baking system. This guide aims to educate and guide users on setting up BakeChain to work safely and securely in four simple steps:
1) Can you even bake, bro?
The first thing you want to find out is if BakeChain is suitable for your device. Download the software, and upon launch you should be asked if you would like to test your hardware. Baking requires a small Proof of Work stamp, that on modern PCs should only take a few seconds to complete. This is used to protect the network from SPAM. Upon completing the test, BakeChain should advise you on how viable your baking will be with BakeChain.
For hardware recommendations, to run the BakeChain baker the most important spec is your CPU. We recommend a fairly modern CPU with at least 2GHz of processing power.
Our recommendation is to score a hash rate of at least 100Kh/s — this should complete the POW stamp within a few seconds most of the time, reducing your misses and increasing your ROI.
2) Baker Setup
Once you know the viability of your hardware, the next step is to setup your baker. You need to decide if you will be baking using a Ledger hardware device, or directly from BakeChain. Ledger is more secure, as it adds an additional layer of security that is currently unbreakable. You reduce the risks of losing your bonds by using a hardware wallet.
If you choose to bake without a Ledger, than your private key will be stored in an encrypted format on your device (note, we don’t store or receive your private key in any form, ever. So it’s important that you backup your private keys/seed words). This is still fairly secure, but if your system is compromised then your private keys could be captured as well.
Our recommendation is to use a Ledger Nano S device to bake with — this is a fairly small price to pay ($100USD) for peace of mind while baking, and will give you other benefits like Double-baking prevention. You can grab a Ledger from the official store here
3) Running a Tezos node
The first area to note is if you will be running your own Tezos node, or if you will be using a public node service (like the TezRPC servers, which are public and free). Running your own node is better for the network, and gives you more control over your node — however if you aren’t able to setup/maintain your node, or your setup is weak/incorrect, you could end up at a loss.
By default, BakeChain will connect to the free public service (TezRPC) for you. If you wish to use your own node, or another service, simply go to the settings cog (top right) and change the RPC address (this can only be done once you have setup your baker).
Our recommendation is that you should run your own node if at all possible, either locally or in the cloud. We will be looking at providing setup and maintenance services for customers to help run nodes on platforms like AWS, Google Cloud and more.
4) Fund your baker!
The final step is to fund your baker. Remember, you need to hold approximately 10%* of what you want to bake as bonds within the baker. You can keep anything else in a separate KT1 address and delegate it to yourself. Do note that this 10% can and will change as the % of staking changes for the network.
Our recommendation is that you keep approximately 15% of your baking stake in your baker, and the remaining on a KT1 address that is owned by a different set of keys (preferably another Ledger device). This adds yet another layer of protection and security for you.
