Today was the latest Chia Network AMA on Zoom and YouTube and there were a lot of questions answered. If you want to check it out, here is the link on YouTube and it is embedded at the bottom of this article. I would like to take a moment to thank the Chia Network team once again for their transparency.
The first question was about the Chia Cultivation Grant and whether it uses the prefarm, and the answer is no. They are not using it. They answered some questions about the pre-farm, the IPO, the Chia community. It was mostly good. The best news is that they really are working towards getting listed on crypto exchanges, and that they expect the process to keep happening with new ones coming online every few weeks for the foreseeable future. I did ask a couple of questions that I don’t think they answered as well as they could have.
The first about trademark. I disagree that they have been following the same principle they try and impose on the community. Nobody thought XCHscan was trying to mimic Chia, they were referencing the Chia Network that Chia Network Inc. developed. And Chia absolutely lead with their lawyers, you can read about at the link above. That’s neither here nor there, as either they will change their strategy and position here or lose badly in federal court. That doesn’t mean violating their trademarks is impossible, either, so be careful.
The second question was actually a combination of two, the first about whether they would announce changes to the network in the future like turning on a bunch of blueboxes and the second about using a Chia Fork as a UAT environment. The first answer was that they didn’t think that turning on the blueboxes was a major change to the network and “shouldn’t have caused a problem” because they had tested in testnet7. The second answer was that they didn’t need a UAT environment / Chia Fork to run stuff on because they had testnet7 for testing. The logical problem here is that obviously testnet7 isn’t good enough for the purposes of a serious financial service company’s test environment. Had they brought those blueboxes online on Flax Network or another fork they probably would have observed the problems there where they didn’t see them in testnet7 before deploying them in production on Chia. Imagine that the nodes had all gone wonky during heavy DeFi usage. Can still happen.
As to the point about not bringing the blueboxes online not being a major change, that is an attitude that will have to evaporate completely from the organization as they take on the government and big financial business contracts they are expecting to run the company on. Those organizations require their vendors to use industry standard change management framework like ITILv3 to handle these situations, and bringing the blueboxes online would absolutely be a Normal Change requiring impacted parties (farmers, pools) to be Informed for that change. “Shouldn’t cause a problem” is a scoring metric for a change, not a determination if an action is a change. This will not be optional for the aspirations that Chia has.
Check out the entire thing below, it really is a good watch. They spend a lot more time answering questions than they need to, and I hope everyone appreciates that. I know I do.
