Another week down, another Chia News recap. As we get closer and closer to the end of 2021 the news about Chia and Chia Network is going to naturally slow down. Things start to slow down and it becomes less likely that something major happens as more and more people are on vacation. That said, we still did get some news this week in the world of Chia and the Chia Forks.
We kicked off our week on The Chia Plot with a bit of a rant about the Windows Chia client from Ryan. Even though it echoes sentiments I have been expressing for months, he focuses more on the bad user experience than the questionable architectural design choices, which in hind sight clearly matter more. Even more prescient is that since he published that rant my farm has gone silently out of sync twice and as of this writing is still syncing from dropping off last night.
The first real news of the week came from the team at HDDCoin who launched the beta test of their HODL program, a smart contract based savings program designed to reduce the incentive to sell coins right away. I am not an expert at Chialisp or smart contracts, but I know a bit and took a quick look at the code and some of the constraints. It did pretty well, they have a very competent team there. I am excited to see what the program looks like when they are done turning knobs from data gathered during the beta.
Later on Monday came the real mega-news of the week; Chia Network has discovered a bug in how the Div command in CLVM divides negative numbers. It is not a common usage, and there is a workable function called Divmod, but it is an issue that it is possible to get incorrect math outputs from the CLVM. Bram Cohen, Founder and CEO of Chia Network, posited the problem to the Keybase Chialisp programming community to get feedback on the possibility of a Chia soft fork to eliminate the risk in a practical sense. I will be keeping an eye on this one, as if a soft fork does come that will be even more critical for farmers to update quickly than normal.
Because he couldn’t find any real news in the ecosystem by Thursday Ryan decided to stir the pot a bit and make his own news. With a post about how drab the community has become on the r/chia subreddit he kind of changed how Chia Network plans on doing ground level PR. I followed that up with my own thoughts on the issue, which mirror Ryan’s in a lot of ways. Based on the reaction he got I think a lot of people feel that way.
That was really it for the big news around Chia for the week, and probably won’t be too much of real substance over the holidays. So because of that, Speedmann has decided to launch his new article series called Facts About Farmers where he is highlighting some of the unique setups and personalities around the Chia ecosystem. I am really loving this, as meeting and learning about all the different folks involved in Chia has been the best part about this blog. There are two entries so far, one about Speedmann himself and the other about Jon from Chialinks.com who really came up with the idea.
And last but not least, Ryan and The Chia Plot are throwing a bit of a holiday contest looking to see what your New Years Chialution is, what you are hoping to see from Chia and Chia Network in the new year and trying to get some positivity front and center again. Its the holiday season, and we are looking for some cheer. Have a great holiday season from all of us at The Chia Plot.
