In a move that I suspect we will see repeated many times over in the next few months, Chia Fork Shamrock has announced they will be shutting down the project due to the cost of the operations. Like all internet facing infrastructure there is a relatively significant cost to running these forks, and so far I do not think anyone is getting paid.
We had not gotten around to covering Shamrock, but if I recall correctly the technical issues being referred to above are related to the fast reward structure. The changes to the code Shamrock made were increasing the number of blocks per day by 9x up to about 43,200. Per day. So this network was likely under strain all the time and needed a really high performance timelord and probably simply chewed through cloud computing resources.
The beauty of open source though, is that if the Shamrock community wants to pick this up and run with it and keep it alive, they should be able to. I’m sure the rest of the Chia Fork community would be happy to help.
I wish the Shamrock team well, and I am curious if they end up taking their learned experiences to another Chia Fork team to continue working. There are still plenty out there.
