Last week, consensus witnesses came together and coordinated to activate HF 24 (Eclipse), and it has been a busy, exciting, and frustrating few days since. Let's take a look at the big successes, what work still needs to be done, and where we need to aim to improve.
The Blockchain and HiveD forked smoothly 🎉
While the approach was a little bumpy, crossing over to version 1.24.2 and higher went incredibly well and without even a stutter. The top twenty witnesses began by holding off meeting consensus to make sure that production (not testing) Hivemind nodes were ready, and that the main frontends were prepared for the switch. As a super-majority got closer and closer, one of the ready Hivemind nodes and an upgraded witness encountered a transaction that required the new version. Despite hoping for a few more minutes to prep, this challenging situation spurred witnesses to take the plunge- the fork was activated, and went off with out a hitch! It is always incredibly exciting and rewarding when blocks start successfully rolling in on a new version. Thanks to Eclipse, our blocks are now part of a chain with expansive potential... and a brand new ID, finally making Hive truly independent from the previous codebase.
Hivemind is almost entirely new, and still needs optimization 📝
After the fork, it's very likely you've noticed some slowdowns or the need to switch your nodes more frequently. We've been very lucky to have robust infrastructure for our ecosystem since the inception of Hive: most users day to day don't really think about nodes or what's actually doing all the work connecting interfaces to the blockchain. However, in the days since HF24, end users are getting very familiar with the concept of nodes and having to switch them. This is far from ideal (and from being as smooth as the fork itself), but it will settle back down as we figure out how to best provision the new Hivemind for everyone.
Right now there are a lot of tweaks and patches as we see how this fully rebuilt API works within our ecosystem, and it means that at any given time a selection of nodes may be replaying. There's no doubt this is frustrating, but given that almost the entire foundation of our API has changed, things are bouncing back fairly quickly and work will continue to get back to a seamless experience for end users.
Here are some node tips and general knowledge that will help you as we get through this period:
If you are seeing posts a few hours old or 'stale' information while browsing an interface, try switching the node that website is using to pull from the blockchain. For example, go into PeakD or Hive.Blog preferences and select a different node from the available list, then refresh.
If you're making a post, comment, or vote and get a broadcast error, the process for changing your node is the same as above if you are logged directly into an interface like PeakD or Hive.Blog. If you're a Keychain or Hivesigner user, those services are what signs and broadcasts for you, so try changing your node under preferences. Here's what the dropdown looks like for Keychain:
If you want to take a look at node status, there are a few helpful sites available: PeakD's benchmark tool, @ausbitbank's node tracker, and @drakos' node list.
Things that need to be fixed as quickly as possible 🛠️
One of the big frustrations and disappointments in the midst of this huge undertaking has been the airdrop issues. When HF24 was activated, liquid and HBD airdrop amounts were corrected exactly as planned. Unfortunately, the vested HP amounts were not. With so many huge things being accomplished with this hardfork, it doesn't feel great that people who have been waiting the longest still have an issue that needs to be addressed. Over the past few days, how to make this fix a top priority without requiring another hardfork and that won't take an extended period of time to complete has been heavily discussed.
The best scenario is to have the HP vested directly to these accounts in full, but there is no way do this with the funds being held by the DHF unless we do an additional fork. Since that would both take too long, too many dev resources, and make things difficult for exchanges, the community will step up to resolve the last outstanding transactions quickly and simply instead.
@Blocktrades has volunteered to organize the large amount of HIVE needed to vest the HP to the waiting accounts up front, with a funded proposal to replace the out of pocket with the original amount being held in trust in the DHF. This is a pretty amazing offer which will not cost anything to the ecosystem and creates a quick and safe way to correct the last amounts for everyone who has already been waiting too long. We won't have to take the route of preparing an additional hardfork, which is good news for security, but also for finally and quickly making things right for these users who have been so patient while things have been out of their control.
➡️ PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR THE PROPOSAL: Learn more about how it will work, and help get it completed.
There's a lot of still to come, but it's worth taking the time to celebrate just how big this undertaking has been.
Everyone in the Hive ecosystem has been incredible in terms of helping contribute to the hardfork effort, including end users supporting each other, community liaisons helping devs and project owners adapt, the teams who have put in an incredible amount of time and work to get this foundation done, and the witnesses who are helping to secure and decentralize Hive. In the coming weeks, it will be time to talk more about the projects being built with Hive, to figure out where we can keep improving at working cooperatively in a decentralized way, and to talk more about what's needed to generate some more momentum for everything Hive powered.
Let's kickstart things by highlighting Hive in Coindesk's Most Influential 2020!
It's been a wild year for everyone, and we've come a long way. On top of everything else, Hive is a contender in a poll by Coindesk celebrating people and groups expanding the blockchain and cryptocurrency space.
CoinDesk needs your help to determine who we should celebrate in this year’s Most Influential series. Our editors and reporters put together a long-list of the top contenders, but we need your vote to decide who will be in the short list.
Please take a minute to visit this short survey link and fill out the poll to help Hive to be included in this series! ⬇️⬇️⬇️