Reconnect and you're back. That's the assumption.
Babylon's finality providers don't get to skip the line that easily. Finality providers have to commit their public randomness in advance, for future block heights, in batches. That's not a minor detail — it's the whole basis for how EOTS signatures work. TimestampingDelayBlocks sets how far ahead that commitment has to reach, and the recommended value is over 10,000 blocks, because the randomness itself isn't usable until it's been timestamped on Bitcoin.
An FP that goes offline longer than its pre-committed window doesn't just miss votes. It runs out of runway entirely.
Say a provider has randomness committed up through height H, then drops offline, then comes back at H plus 100 — past the edge of what it planned for. It can't just start voting again. It has to submit a new commit, and that commit still has to wait for BTC timestamping to catch up before it activates. The outage and the recovery are two separate delays stacked on top of each other.
That felt backwards at first. I assumed uptime was the whole problem — get your node back online, you're back in business. But uptime and voting eligibility turn out to be two different clocks here, and the second one was set days or weeks in advance, before the outage ever happened.
So an operator's real resilience isn't just "how fast can I restart." It's "how far ahead did I plan before anything went wrong" — a decision baked into a config value long before there was any outage to recover from.
If your ability to vote again after an outage was decided by a number you set before the outage happened, how much of an operator's "reliable uptime" reputation is actually just a bet made in advance, and how much is genuine resilience in the moment?
@BabylonLabs_io #baby $BABY
Babylon's finality providers don't get to skip the line that easily. Finality providers have to commit their public randomness in advance, for future block heights, in batches. That's not a minor detail — it's the whole basis for how EOTS signatures work. TimestampingDelayBlocks sets how far ahead that commitment has to reach, and the recommended value is over 10,000 blocks, because the randomness itself isn't usable until it's been timestamped on Bitcoin.
An FP that goes offline longer than its pre-committed window doesn't just miss votes. It runs out of runway entirely.
Say a provider has randomness committed up through height H, then drops offline, then comes back at H plus 100 — past the edge of what it planned for. It can't just start voting again. It has to submit a new commit, and that commit still has to wait for BTC timestamping to catch up before it activates. The outage and the recovery are two separate delays stacked on top of each other.
That felt backwards at first. I assumed uptime was the whole problem — get your node back online, you're back in business. But uptime and voting eligibility turn out to be two different clocks here, and the second one was set days or weeks in advance, before the outage ever happened.
So an operator's real resilience isn't just "how fast can I restart." It's "how far ahead did I plan before anything went wrong" — a decision baked into a config value long before there was any outage to recover from.
If your ability to vote again after an outage was decided by a number you set before the outage happened, how much of an operator's "reliable uptime" reputation is actually just a bet made in advance, and how much is genuine resilience in the moment?
@BabylonLabs_io #baby $BABY