After the Dust Storm on the weekend, Chia Network is calling it an “anonymous tester”, they have published an update on their Github about what happened and how they plan on responding. The tdlr is that about 20% of nodes were affected in one way or another, either directly through performance issues or by being connected to too many peers with performance issues, and that they plan on releasing 1.2.11 “within the week” with some optimizations with more coming. They are also planning on adding the option for fees with plot NFT operations to allow for pool changes during congestion.
They were also kind enough to publish a summary of the update, so I will post that here and encourage you to head over to Github or Reddit to read the whole thing. Reddit if you want to fight someone, of course.
- Fees are now a reality, sooner than expected but it was expected eventually. Adding fees, even minimum ones, during peak times will keep your transactions flowing. Not adding fees will still go through, but likely be delayed at times of high-transactions.
- We identified several optimizations for the nodes, and devs are currently working on those patches and testing them thoroughly.
- We have helped, and will continue to help, pools implement fee support in their operations. (And adding a new endpoint to let them auto-calculate the most optimum fee for the current network needs.)
- We are adding more custom fee support to the UI elements that currently lack them.
- In the end, despite the work we need to do above, the chain remained strong and moved forward steadily. Transactions were delayed and some signage points were slowed down, and it wasn’t the best experience for about 20% of our nodes, but all in all we weathered the storm stably.
- In further days down the road, once the dust settles (lol), and we pin down the finalized aspects of our optimizations, expect a more comprehensive post mortem summary from us.
I actually don’t think this is a big deal. I think the promise you can run a node on super low end hardware is clearly a fiction, but I never really thought that was a good idea. I do think that Chia needs something architecturally similar to FlexFarmer, whether developed by them or by a 3rd party, so that farmers without powerful hardware can reliably farm Chia. It doesn’t have to do everything centrally, but there needs to be a way to farm without keeping a node synced. Otherwise people will just quit.
On the contrary, I don’t want a similar flexfarmer