One great feature in Komodo is its consensus protocol, delayed Proof of Work, which relies on notary nodes to engrave the data from the Komodo blockchain on to the Bitcoin blockchain, thus giving its users the same security that Bitcoin users themselves enjoy. In order to notarize blocks from Komodo on the Bitcoin blockchain, notary nodes must make custom Bitcoin transactions and pay its respective tx fee which is one of the reasons the Komodo team has decided to host this crowd sale.
Community members that want to run one of these notary nodes are advised to make this interest public as to gather votes from the investors. These votes should be based not only on the user's long standing reputation within the cryptocurrency community, but also on the candidate's ability and experience in running serious serves. Notary nodes receive a monthly wage of ~$500 (to pay for expenses and as a reward) for the effort and resources contributed. Voters can also use the testnet KMD as one metric in evaluating a notary node.
The Komodo platform will require 64 notary nodes to which the vast majority of the 3 KMD block reward is expected to be allocated to. If the market price of the monthly 1/64th share amounts to less than $500, the Komodo team will use the ICO funds to cover the difference. The minimum specifications for the server are 64 GB RAM + 500 GB SSD and 100 mbps bandwidth. Another requirement to running a notary node is to monitor the 'notarynode' channel in the SuperNET slack. That is where real-time updates and issues will be communicated.
Anyone can be a notary node candidate, but all notary nodes must be elected with sufficient stakeholder power to win a spot. This is a crucial aspect and one of the reasons for a large ICO, so that we get as broad of an investor base as possible to make obtaining a 51% control as difficult as possible.
Candidates are advised to post their handle, the geographic region of where their server will be hosted, how much testnet KMD they have mined, relevant experience and whatever other info they may feel is helpful for the electorate to know on our bitcointalk thread.
Before voting begins, we will have a notary node certification results that will also be included on the ballot. We have arbitrarily segregated the world into 4 regions: North America, Europe, Asia, Southern Hemisphere. A single notary node operator can run a max of 1 node per region, for a total of 4. However, each notary node needs to be elected in its region.
While nobody will get rich running even 4 notary nodes, it should be a nice bit of extra income to those that do run it as most of the work is to just make sure the server keeps running and to update to the latest versions.
