This week was another week where we did not get a ton of Chia news. I think that anyone just starting to pay attention to this space should probably get used to that pattern. We go a few weeks with tons of news of information dropping, then a few weeks where we dissect and disseminate without much coming out of Chia Network Inc. So this week we mostly had to make our own news as the Chia community.
First, we kicked off the week with the newest The Chia Plot writer Ryan with the first part in his excellent guide on trading Chia. This is a truly fantastic series, developed with an absolute beginner in mind without even enough knowledge about the space to search for proper resources. He details terminology and slang, and outlines many of the risks new traders will face. Throughout the week we got two more parts, with part two covering crypto exchange selection and part three the different type of basic trades. Personally, I am learning a lot with these guides as a relative trading novice and I expect even folks with some experience will find them valuable.
A couple of days later I got a random deposit of an unknown CAT, or Chia asset token, in my Chia light wallet. This was unexpected and it allowed me write about the experience of getting a CAT transfer without having prepped the wallet first. The CAT in question is CryptoShibe, but you can literally name them whatever you want. I think the experience is pretty good when dealing with a single, or small number of CATs, but I can see a scenario where someone mints 1000 different CATs from a single XCH and sends 1 of each to every address that has received a transaction and just pollutes everyone’s light wallets. I think we need a way to clear stuff out, and have it stay cleared.
After a significant amount of time, presumably for review and remediation processes, Nucle has released the source code to their back end service. This has caused a lot of consternation and debate in the Chia community, primarily on Discord and I would like to address both sides of that right now. First off, Nucle is not open source. It uses open source components, but without the ability to see how transactions are signed or what is done with the keys its not really an open source tool. The critics are correct about that. That being said, so what? They are opening up significant parts of it to show, with evidence, the architecture of how their tool works. The have opened up enough to address most of the most vocal questions about their tool and answer lingering questions left by DFI’s first launch of Arbor Wallet. They are at least as open source as some popular crypto wallets – and much more so than others. I think they could open up to the degree Metamask has, but it isn’t a requirement. Up to you how big a deal this makes to you, but please stop the bickering. All of you.
More app news came after that, this time being a major milestone for The Chia Plot. OpenChia released their pool app on Android and iOS with native The Chia Plot integration. I think, and I could be wrong, but based on how we did it this might be the best ad-free way to view stories from this blog right now. I’m a big fan, so if you are looking for a new pool and a mobile app is a big part of that decision, check them out. Or if you are a pool looking for your own app, they have of course released it under the GPLv3 so as long as you don’t close the source you are free to contribute and build your own from their work.
And finally, some intrepid SpaceFarmers have kicked off a bit of a timestorm with their community effort to build BlueBox timelords and change the curve on compactified blocks. I think they have. If you check AreWeCompactifiedYet you can see that in the last week or so we have taken it from around 33 or 34% to a little under 40% of the blockchain. And because of the effort, Chia Network has spun back up their fleet of BlueBoxes. According to a reddit comment, they turned on 100 over the weekend. Let’s hope we don’t see a repeat of the DDOS effect we saw a few weeks about because this time I don’t think people are stopping. Mr England, Director of Devops at Chia, and I were talking yesterday about a friendly contest of Chia vs the Community on BlueBox compactification so check back here over the next few days for some more details.
That’s mostly it for the news this week. Gene has been teasing both whitepaper updates and project Asteroids details all week on keybase so its possible we get some of that over the next week, but if not we may have to make our own news again this week. Try to make it good news.
good news
flexpool reddit account has been suspended
For what?