Based on this text available on nearprotocol.com, are differences among these nodes behavioral concerns in userland or are they actually encoded at an implementation level in the nodes themselves?
In other words, are these differences about the choices people make while participating on the network or can I somehow start a node differently to get it to act as a "chunk producing node" vs. a "fishing node"?
Three types of validator nodes contribute to securing the NEAR network:
- Chunk producers, who collect transactions for a shard and produce and communicate shard blocks, called chunks
- Block producers, who produce a single block containing all current chunks
- Fishermen, who watch and verify that state transitions in different blocks are accurate
Those who stake above the minimum fishermen threshold and who are not elected to be validators become fishermen.