Thanks for nice breakdown @sahkan. I've put it to table based on your definition.

Role	Stores blockchain	Public RPC	Provides blockchain via p2p	Generates blocks	Includes history plugins
Witness	✔	❌	✔	✔	❌
Seed	✔	❌	✔	❌	❌
Full node	✔	✔/ ❌	✔	❌	✔

All roles are covered by the built-in witness_node program and the particular role is determined by configuration and environment implications.

Other opinions are welcome :-)

Quote from: knaperek on November 16, 2017, 04:31:27 pm

I was just hoping it would be possible to run a single seed node that works for any chain ID, similarly to BitTorrent DHT nodes.

Not possible so far.

Thanks for the clarification abit. For some reason I thought there were two types of nodes :
1.) Seed nodes that only provide node discovery service
2.) Actual full nodes (or witnesses) that keep track of the blockchain and serve blocks to other peers on request
If this was the case then I guess the seed nodes could be made more generic and thus shared among all graphene based projects (Bitshares, Steem, ...), which could provide better reliability overall. I'd draw a parallel with BitTorrent  - no matter which torrent you are downloading, the DHT nodes are the same (disregarding some optimizations that are not important in this context because the number of chains is significantly lower than the number of BitTorrent infohashes).

So, please corrent me if I'm wrong, but the way it works now is that there's no role separation between Seed nodes and Witness nodes and there's just a single program (binary) that runs it, listening on a single port, right?

Hello, I'm creating a custom blockchain forked from BitShares and would be happy to give back to the BitShares community and open up my Seed Nodes for BitShares users as well. So I was wondering whether it is possible to have a single seed node that supports multiple Chain IDs. Any ideas?