I know you haven’t heard from me for a while. I’m sorry for that.
I have a very good reason, though: Hive.
You may think that since all the drama with Steem and HF23 fork when Hive was born things have been quiet and peaceful.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
A lot of us are working to make Hive better and better.
One block at a time.
Upcoming HardFork 24
You can find more on that in @hiveio posts
TL;DR:
- Our very own ChainID
- Improved Governance (30 day governance cooldown for a newly powered up stake)
- Airdrop to excluded accounts (per community decision)
- A lot of code improvements.
Eclipse code released
Code improvements are so huge that I suggested they deserve a major version increment and even a fancy code name.
+--- major
v
v0.23.0
^ ^--- patch (updates within given hardfork version, security patches, improvements)
|
+--- minor (equals to hardfork number)
If not now, then when?
IMHO it will have a way bigger impact on the Hive infrastructure than the release of MIRA and Appbase combined.
And that’s just the beginning.
I believe with all the great minds we have around we can work miracles.
”and everything under the Sun is in tune but the Sun is eclipsed by the moon"
- Eclipse , Pink Floyd
We are not there yet.
While the Eclipse release itself is an awesome and a huge achievement, more work needs to be done before the Hive platform can be upgraded. We need to make sure that everything will work as expected and that developers, project owners, and dApp creators are well prepared for it.
Architecture changes
In a week or two I’m going to release the next episode of Hive Pressure that will address all the big changes to Hive infrastructure enabled by Eclipse.
Spoiler Alert: we are getting rid of the FAT nodes.
Yes, this will mean a little bit of extra work for the AH nodes, which will now have to be able to feed Hivemind with the data previously provided by FAT nodes. Yes, this will also mean a little bit of extra work for the Hivemind.
The gains?
One spare server, 3-4 days of replay time that each FAT node required, 270GB of space unnecessarily taken by a separate copy of blocks, and 110GB of storage taken by MIRA. Or even a 256GB RAM server, if you were brave enough not to run your FAT node on MIRA.
That's just about the FAT nodes.
A (non-MIRA) consensus node using Eclipse requires 17GB of RAM instead of 60-ish.
An AH node requires .. about 18GB RAM.
(Holy cat!)
Coco: devops & secops assistant.
More on that in the upcoming Hive Pressure episode (hopefully, I’ll have some spare time for that).
Test node
There’s a https://beta.openhive.network endpoint running Eclipse code (well, the internal versioning was not changed accordingly yet, because this is a bit tricky and needs to be considered wisely and carefully).
Anyway it’s a pre-release candidate based on the https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive code tagged 1.0.0.
Currently it’s directly linked to the node itself (i.e. without jussi, so also no hivemind)
Feel free to use it for tests, but please keep in mind that it’s connected to the Hive mainnet.
Eclipse nodes in the wild
There are plenty of nodes with Eclipse code running all around including my servers.
Don’t try this at home unless you know what you are doing and you are familiar with the code.
The official Hive Fork release will be announced properly, so you won’t miss it for sure.
BTW FWIW, no, my witness node running Eclipse code was never any threat to the network
(if that were possible then our decentralized universe would be in a lot of trouble).
Last but not least
OpenHive.Chat is now featured on https://hive.blog replacing obsolete Steem.Chat
The previous instance is still running, it’s bridged with a new one, but moving to OpenHive.Chat is highly recommended and (IMHO) preferred over Discord communication for anyone supporting free software projects.
You should consider this for your own safety.
Kudos for @crimsonclad and @followbtcnews for keeping the lights on and making this possible.
OpenHive.Chat is powered by the very same software as the old instance - Rocket.Chat, it has improved a lot over the years, and if you haven't checked it recently, consider giving it another chance.
Subliminal OpenHive.Chat advertisement. Less subliminal in Night Mode ;-)
While the communication itself is off-chain, it uses secure Hive-powered authentication. You use your Hive username and Private Posting Key to log in through Hivesigner (kudos to @good-karma, @fabien, and @wehmoen for helping to make that happen).
Your posting key isn’t sent anywhere, it doesn’t even leave your browser. It’s not sent to Hivesigner or OpenHive.Chat. Your browser uses it to securely sign the proof that you are who you say you are. Unlike some other dApps, it doesn’t even require you to add posting authority.
Because we are still preoccupied with other tasks essential to the core Hive improvements, we are not pushing users to move to the new chat instance yet (slightly under 200 on the new instance already, almost 90k users to be moved from the old one). Take your seats before the room gets crowded ;-)
See you on the OpenHive.Chat