read
The NEM developers have been focused on making the NEM platform secure. Delegated harvesting is an important security feature because now a person can safely use any node on the network to harvest without fear of having their account being compromised.
On most POS based cryptocurrencies a private key must be passed to a node for one to harvest/forge. This is a security risk because it exposes the private key to potentially malicious actors. In NEM a person can delegate their importance score to another account that has no actual XEM in it. If that account is exposed, there is nothing to steal. While at the same time, any funds harvested on the delegated account will go directly to the original account that initiated the delegated harvesting. All the same benefits with none of the risks.
Getting started1) Setting Up To activate "delegated harvesting", first open your wallet up. You will notice that you have two options. One is to “Start local harvesting” and the other is to “Activate delegated harvesting”.
To activate "delegated harvesting", please stop local harvesting first. Then select “Activate delegated harvesting”.
You will then see a popup that explains it will take 6 hours to start harvesting. Enter your wallet password and click okay.
If you were successful, you should now notice that there is a new transaction in your Dashboard that shows that you have made an “importance transfer” essentially delegating your importance score to another account that you may now use freely without any risk to your real account.
2) Starting After 6 hours has elapsed the button that was once labeled “Start local harvesting” should now read “Start delegated harvesting”. You can click on this button and may now harvest on any NIS safely whether that be a local machine or a remote node.
If everything is working correctly, you will now see an option to “Stop delegated harvesting”.
You now have all of the benefits of remotely harvesting safely with none of the risk. Congratulations!
Trouble shooting:
If you get an error message 699, please try to restart the NEM software. (There is a known bug in the latest version that will be fixed in the next release.)
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://blog.nem.io/how-to-use-delegated-harvesting/