Big Blue for Big Green
The biggest news story of the day is storage_jm officially taking a new position with the Chia Network. Starting Monday JM will be the Head of Storage with the Chia Network. If you’ve spent anytime in the community you know JM and the value he has brought to the project. Up to this point it was all from his own good will and love of Chia. After 10+ years at Intel we can add JM to the list of growing brilliant minds leaving the “traditional” world and entering crypto.
Chia Decentral will still have him on to do our Sunday AMA and if he has time he’ll post a weekly video troubleshooting common questions about plotting and farming.
Congrats again storage_jm, what a wild ride.
Chia Decentral Pool Survey
Last week we released a survey to understand what you want out of a pool for Chia. We believe pools are a critical function to responsibly and sustainably grow the farmer community.
We have received over 3,000 responses. In the next few days, we’ll post an article for the community with all of the data. Our hope is that prospective pool operators can design their structure around the survey feedback.
If you haven’t already submitted your responses, please use this link and give us your feedback.
Block Sync at 255108
I’ll let the Github notes do the talking.
We were not checking for negative values in the uint64 constructor. Therefore coins with negative values were added to the mempool. These blocks passed validation, but they did not get added into the blockchain due to negative values not serializing in uint64. Farmers making these blocks would make blocks that did not make it into or advance the chain, so the blockchain slowed down starting at block 255518 around 6:35AM PDT 5/9/2021. The fix adds a check in the mempool and block validation, and does not disconnect peers who send these invalid blocks (any peer 1.1.4 or older), making this update not mandatory but is recommended. Users not updating might see their blocks get rejected from other peers. Upgraded nodes will show an error when they encounter an old node trying to send an invalid block. This “Consensus error 124…” can be safely ignored.
From Neal on Chia Decentral:
The network error began from unexpected negative integers making it into transactions to be validated, which resulted in invalid transactions and blocks that were not accepted onto the chain, slowing down the chain and causing the hiccup. The developers were able to move swiftly to nip the bug, resolving the integer error for the hotfix.
I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but I have to acknowledge how amazing the entire Chia team is at addressing these issues. We had Mariano in the chat immediately taking bug submissions and trouble shooting potential issues. A hot fix was released within the hour and followed up with 1.1.5 to fix the problem and farmers were synced and farming almost immediately. The team has set an unbelievably high bar.
Coin Price
We are one week down with an actual coin price. XCH briefly hit a high around $2,000 on Monday with a dip to $450 and settling in at $1,000-$1,200 the last two days.
No US-eligible exchanges support XCH today, but a number of oversea exchanges are live and trading, the largest is OKEx. Farmers have their first look at profitability numbers and we expect immediate Netspace growth will trail farming profitability until we run in to hardware supply chain restrictions. Low liquidity and small volumes make exact pricing unreliable but I expect to see continued Netspace growth while it is still very profitable to plot and farm.
Netspace Growth
Still insane. The syncing issue halted a little exponential momentum on Sunday, but the Netspace broke through 3 EiB up from 1.9 EiB the week before. Gene teased a crawler update on the number nodes and it had connected with 225,000 over the last few days. 1,000,000 nodes is within reach before the BTC conference on June 4th.
Chia in the News
On Thursday May 6th, CNN posted a quick article featured on their homepage about Chia
“This crypto claims to solve bitcoin’s biggest problem”
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/06/investing/green-cryptocurrency-chia/index.html
As I was writing this I was sent another article posted on Sunday from Fortune
“A new cryptocurrency claims to be an eco-friendly Bitcoin alternative. Is chia worth a look?“
https://fortune.com/2021/05/09/chia-green-eco-friendly-cryptocurrency-farming-bitcoin-mining/
I don’t usually read too much in to these headlines, but paired with the Chia subreddit passing 25k subscribers, XCH breaking in to the top 20 most viewed coin on CoinMarketCap https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/n8eike/xch_is_the_19th_most_viewed_coin_on_coinmarketcap/ and US based traffic steadily growing on Chia Decentral, we can feel the momentum build as we wait for a US-supported exchange to announce the support of Chia.
JM and Kyle AMA
Chia Decentral Content Schedule
We have beefed up our content schedule for you and have a tentative plan for at least the next month.
Sunday – JM and Kyle AMA
Monday – Space Farmer weekly recap
Tuesday – Chia Culture and Business
Wednesday – JM featured video
Thursday – “Tools of Chia” series with a featured guest post from a creator in the community. If you have built or are building a tool and product for Chia give us a shout at [email protected] if you’d like to have a feature.
Friday – Chia Community stories. I want to highlight a member of the community each Friday that is working on an interesting project or has a unique farming setup. If you have a story you want to share with the community, submit your writeup to [email protected] subject: Chia Story.
We also have a few new members of Chia Decentral but we’ll wait a few more days before the official announcements.
Another week in the books. Thank you again for your support and we look forward to building something great with all of you.
Happy Farming!
