In the process of searching for the truth, we decided to ask you guys a question, dispel doubts and clarify how to properly stop a working node that is a member of the baking committee. In this regard, a few questions:
Is it possible, being a baker at the moment, to cleanly turn off the node and carry out its maintenance without fear of falling under slashing mechanisms? How long (week, month), as a Baker, can you be offline and what are the consequences (Jailing?) ?
Is there a good chance to get banned for 24/168 hours if, being a Baker, accidentally / deliberately kill process (not clean) ?
What happens to my percentage of the reward when my Baker node is offline ? Will it be automatically and immediately redistributed among all other baking participants ?
Is the only consequence of me being offline that I just don’t participate in the lottery?
Currently there is no jailing or slashing, so the only consequence of being a registered baker and not being active is that you do not get the rewards for baking. You will not get banned, or actively punished in any way for being inactive.
Your stake is unaffected by your node being offline, but you do not produce any blocks, and hence you get no baker or block rewards. Being registered and offline means that the network as a whole will produce (on average) fewer blocks in the same time period.
The best way to stop being a baker, from the perspective of the network, is to
deregister as a baker (e.g., via the desktop wallet, or concordium-client)
wait for 1 week (the cooldown period)
stop the node (if you don’t want to run it anymore).
On the other hand, if you need to perform node maintenance (e.g., restart, update, migrate) you should do that without deregistering a baker. You will not be punished for being offline for a few hours.