This was a pretty slow week for Chia news, coming hot off the heels of multiple very busy weeks of announcements and releases. It was also Thanksgiving in the USA where most of the Chia Network team is located. The biggest news this week was centered in the world of forks, and honestly I didn’t even cover it all because it was my birthday week and I take breaks too but I will give some of them a shout out here.
Its not really news but we started off the week with a video from Digital Spaceport where he and I sat down with JM Hands from Chia Network to talk about many topics. Despite my best efforts the guys were able to turn it into a really good conversation through talent, knowledge and careful editing. Go check out it out here and give JM a reason to come talk to us again.
Also on Monday I got an update from Chia about what had caused the weird netspace jitters with the pools. It was, as I suspected, and issue with timelords issuing signage points at a slower rate. Originally Chia informed me that it was caused by someone else bringing a faster timelord online but it actually appears that both timelords involved were run by Chia Network themselves. I did not update the article, due to the aforementioned laziness, but they did continue to investigate and discovered that there was an unknown discrepancy in speed between their two fastest timelords and what we saw was the first one dropping off. These kind of issues are exactly why they are developing and launching their ASIC timelord for next year.
Other than that, the only real news came from the forks. In an article I am behind on writing, a number of forks have already launched their own version of the Chia light wallet. From what I can tell, that number is one and that fork is Flax. They even say they fixed the upstream bug that caused issues with the Chia light wallet when installed on a machine actively farming. Well done, Flaxseed. This actually happened on the 20th, but I didn’t get to it then and it really does deserve a shout out ASAP.
After that both Stai and HDDCoin have launched their online stores, with slightly different behaviour from each. Stai is offering more items through a partnership with existing stores, but only allows you to pay their markup in Stai with the rest paid in Euros. HDDCoin lets you pay the entire thing in HDD or in USD, but is only offering a drive at not great value and some branded merch for now. I think they are both great approaches and neither one is exposing themselves to too much risk.
Finally I put out a call for new writers for The Chia Plot yesterday, and received way more interest than I anticipated so I am putting that on hold for now while I speak to everyone who reached out. Rest assured if you reached out to me and I haven’t gotten back to you yet, I will and we will chat.
It is definitely possible I missed something, I always do. I think SpaceBucks gave out everything and shut down their faucet so I hope everyone got some. Let’s see what this week in Chia brings, and I hope all the American Chia farmers and Chia Network developers had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
