Witness Update: Brand New Hive. Eclipse is coming!

in Blockchain Wizardry5 years ago

I know you haven’t heard from me for a while. I’m sorry for that.
I have a very good reason, though: Hive.

Very short, promotional HD video rendered for a brand new Hive fork 24. Bee Impressed ;-)

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.

beebusy.gif

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.jpg
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.


OpenHive.Chat
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

The liquid part of author rewards will be used to feed Hive developers with Pizza.
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Great work. I chipped in for the pizza too 🍕👍

BTW, will the regular guys like me be able to run nodes after this huge optimization? And will there be some easy to follow tutorials with docker images to use?

Thanks!

That's certainly one of the major goals of the optimization work. We're not really done with optimizations yet, but it's already getting to the point where running an API node isn't that costly. And setup and maintenance is definitely simpler too, since you only have to run one one node instead of two to have a full API node.

Great. Looking forward to try it out. Thanks!

It’s always healthy to get rid of some FAT and replace it with more muscle power. Your wizard work is always appreciated🤗

From a user perspective nothing interesting on this hard fork, where is the famous SMT?

The current devs believe that we should optimize existing code as much as possible before enabling SMTs. SMTs could potentially increase the number of blockchain transactions quite a lot, and we want to be sure that we are ready for that possibility.

Also, running a full Hive API node is currently quite expensive, so we still feel the number one priority is to lower that cost, so that anyone with an interest can afford to run a node. This makes the entire Hive ecosystem more decentralized (which is useful to any user who doesn't want a platform where they can be effectively be censored by a single organization).

I believe you bring an essential perspective, it is important to save cost.

Does this mean that there are going to be more hard-forks before smt-one? Do you think we could get the smt's this year?

The roadmap for the next hardfork after the upcoming one hasn't been set yet (neither feature set or estimated release date have been discussed). So I'm not yet sure how many hardforks we will have this year. Realistically, I would expect there will just be one or two more hardforks this year after the upcoming one, as we've almost hit the half way point for the year already.

At this moment, I would expect SMTs to be released this year. But we haven't done any review yet of the current state of the SMT code (in terms of functionality, performance, code quality, etc), so it's a bit early to be certain about the timing.

good to know this is being done, yeah, that's important to reduce the costs of running a full node.

That sounds awesome!

Hope the hive devs will get their pizza.

You can also bring them bread... just saying :p

Upvotes for Coco...

Looking forward to our ChainID as well. I wonder if we will see Steem return to blocktivity after that.

Thank you :-)

As for Steem I see no reason for that. It's broken, centrally controlled, and obsolete.

Even so it's still fun to watch Steems numbers slowly decline. I heard many stat posters like @penguinpablo on Steem have been censored since Steems stats have been on the decline since after the split.


Congratulations @gtg!
You raised your level and are now a Whale!

Do not miss the last post from @hivebuzz:

Introducing the HiveBuzz API for applications and websites

Oh, cool. Whale done! ;-)

Congratulation for your achievements on the Hive blockchain @gtg 😀

Congratulations @gtg! You received a personal badge!

Happy Hive Birthday! You are on the Hive blockchain for 4 years!

You can view your badges on your board And compare to others on the Ranking

Excellent a way for the platform to grow and strengthen.

Excelente una buena forma de que la plataforma crezca y se fortalezca.

Thanks for the Update @gtg. Always good to keep up on what's going on ;)

This is pretty cool, good to know we are making progress ,what kind of pizza though?

They'll have to reach the consensus, that's always a good exercise ;-)

Interesting, so a fork is coming ... now, i read your post, and i am a noob with this techy things, but i do have a question, which some might think is kind of stupid, but still .... Someone once told me there are no stupid questions, only ridiculous answers, so here i go ... In laymen's terms of a not native english speaker, so bear with me.

Because of a certain tax loophole, i have been looking for a starting project to get into earning trough mining etc ...

So, to my understanding, a hard fork means another project running on the same (but altered) blockchain, so for this new project not to become too decentralized, you need nodes ... am i right, or is my thinking already going in the wrong direction? now, if i have an old mac around, i can run a node on it? and then earn? Or do i need to run one of those insane mining rigs based on gpu’s? To earn?

Hard Fork is required when you are changing the rules on a blockchain.

--Steem 20--+--obsolete
             \
              +--Steem 21--+--obsolete
                            \
                             +--Steem 22--+--Steemit's centralized fraud machine.
                                           \
                                            +--Hive 23--X--+-- obsolete
                                                        ^   \
                                                        |    +--Hive 24-->
                                                        |
                                                    we are here

Not all hard forks are used to create parallel universe some are just used to upgrade the technology and improve the rules. That's our case.

so for this new project not to become too decentralized, you need nodes

The other way around. But you are writing about mining, and mining is a think on a Proof-of-Work chains. Hive is a Delegated Proof of Stake. There's no mining here. On PoW chains, those who have more computing power have the best chance to produce blocks. On DPoS chains such as Hive, the best chance for block production have those with the highest approval (most stake-weighted votes) from the stakeholders.

Thank you for this, and the excellent explanation of dpos,

When i am thinking about tge delegated proof of stake, in combination with social media, isn’t there a too big first mover advantage?

No, I don't think so, I'd notice that ;-)

That is a massive amount of resource saving. Can I run a node on my phone? :P

Not yet :-)

Great work,

What kind of Pizza?

I don't know, it's up to them.
By the way, choosing kind of Pizza is a good exercise about reaching the consensus.

It's a useful analogy.

I guess Justin Sun's problem was that he was too insistent on anchovies.

Maybe Hive has to just aim for the being the Margarita, and people can bring their own toppings!

The Pizza in picture is shaping my dinner plans!

Maybe Hive has to just aim for the being the Margarita, and people can bring their own toppings!

Love it :)

These sound like great improvements for running the system. Thanks for all the hard work.
As one of the main Devs on hive and a top witness I was wondering what your thoughts were on adding ads to hive.blog and creating some revenue and buying pressure for the token.
A lot of people have been talking about it and we do need external money to flow into the system. Finance leo have been doing it very well and a buy/burn of hive could be very benificial.

https://peakd.com/hive-174578/@niallon11/ads-on-hive-blog-add-value-to-the-token-price-rather-than-take-it-away

I don't think that ads in their classic form are something that could make Hive better.
Especially that Steemit's idea of "self served" ads that we used to see in the condenser.

Of course it's up to hive.blog owner and remember it's just one of the dapps.

A way better approach is to show people that instead of paying for classic ads, they can brag about their products or services directly on the platform.
They can engage with the community, gain influence; power up their Hive.
That could be mutually beneficial.

IMHO few bucks from some random scammers being able to advertise their scheme on one of the Hive frontends isn't worth it.

By the way, the only case I know where attention is paid to classic ads is when my ad blocker does it to get rid of them ;-)

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not sure who is in charge of hive.blog which is why I asked your opinion as a prominent witness. It being the gateway to hive and the launchpad of the new chain places it as more than just a simple dapp in my mind at least. Which doesn't say much. Or carry any weight.

Some of those ads on steemit were nothing more than a shill but before the hardfork they had managed to generate enough revenue to stop selling the ninja mined stake which amounts to a fair amount of dollars per month. The difference being that they were using it to fund their own ends rather than add value to the community which is where I see ads coming in.

A few neatly placed banners wouldn't affect anybody's user experience and as you say a lot of people use ad blocker which won't even show them on the feed but there are cases where they can work in crypto. Finance leo have started to integrate some small discreet ads and have already increased their ad revenue by 2.15x since last month just from an increase in users. They use this revenue to buy back their LEO token and keep the value high.

It's only about $200 per month right now but hive.blog would command a much higher rate and it would be nice to see a steady buy order on the tokens going forward. If that got up to 10k per month it would make an impact.

A way better approach is to show people that instead of paying for classic ads, they can brag about their products or services directly on the platform.

And I agree with you on this point as i think in the long run adding users will be the usp of HIVE and bring in more users, devs and investment but as we all know. Without a strong price point on a token it is very hard to bring people in. That's where I see ads being the bridging factor to keep pushing up the token price through buy backs as we try to add more users and long term value to the chain.

More buying and less selling. That's just what is rattling around in my head at the moment anyway but I'm involve in business and hate to see wasted revenue passing by.

Either way, keep up the good work behind the scenes. We appreciate it.

This is really awesome

Amazing update, and I got it so quickly after asking!

Upvoted for tuxedo cat dev Coco.

I am glad that you people are working to make Hive stable and adding more features.

Thanks Wizard and everyone else working behind the scene!!!

I finally got to see a post by the number one witness. Thsnks for the update. Although,A lot of complexities.. will check out openhive.chat right away

Man I'm excited about this release. I might finally be able to run a RPC node by the sound of it.

When will I be able to run a node on my eight year old, six gig box? That kind of decentralization will dramatically increase the security of the chain IMHO.

Thanks for all your hard work!

Amount of nodes doesn't matter that much in DPoS for security, but it matters a lot for decentralization (i.e. having ability to run your very own instance of fully featured backend+frontend instance on a reasonably priced hardware would be a great win).

When will I be able to run a node on my eight year old, six gig box?

While that might be possible at some point, I don't think that's there's much sense at aiming at that.
I'd rather aim for running current state of blockchain on a current consumer grade hardware.

niezła ta Asystentka! 💙
(chociaż trochę wąsata 😛)

"OpenHive.Chat is now featured on https://hive.blog"
How is it featured? All I see is a link... is that what you mean?

Yes, a link in a hamburger menu.
No seamless integration if that's you were thinking about.
Don't worry, peakd can still be the first ;-)

I like this idea of optimising the foundations of the blockchain before building SMTs etc. It is really a sign of long term commitment.

Thanks for the update on the positive progress! Efficiency is a good project goal. Making it cheaper to run APIs will definitely encourage decentralisation and even minnows like me would be interested in at least finding out what it takes to run a node :-) instead of assuming that it is way out of reach.

Great update, you are my one of the best witness out there. Great work, we appreicate your work. Hive is far better than ever because of great witness like you. Cheers 🍯

@gtg,
I wish we might think about 4 weeks power down time like STEEM does. For me it's interesting, specially for curation based projects.

Cheers~

That's possible, however personally I'm for longer lock times.

Awesome, I'm just a day away from Hivemind completing index and have everything set up for a Fat Node and Account History node. With the new improvements I'll be able to run primary and back up Witness twice, plus the full Jussi RPC node layout and still have spare capacity from my four servers. Excellent work from the whole team at Hive - I know this has required massive work and investment - and I'm sure our entire user base appreciates it.

Hell yeah!!

I also believe there is more 'IQ' per MB here in HIVE than anywhere else in the cryptoverse,

Mx. @gtg thank you for being frickin' awesome.

It looks like Hive is getting a lot more development than 'the other place'. They just seem to care about buying votes and downvoting any dissent. I hope further developments will get more people running nodes and that in time they will be able to earn a decent amount. It's yet another way this platform can empower people.

Keep up the good work.

cool! can i use this in a hive marketing campaign we are launching? this video ..it's really neat...the campaign is a contest to see who can onboard the most new hive users...

Sure :-)

I am so glad that we have a friend that understands all of the foreign language in this post, but for some reason it all sounds very good for Hive.
With you guys around we cannot go wrong!

Super interested in the code / structure optimization that allow to save so many resources :)

🍕

Thanks for the update!

A complex update not for my brain to decipher

This is some heavy stuff... DOC..!

Congratulations @gtg! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You received more than 30000 upvotes. Your next target is to reach 35000 upvotes.

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If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

To support your work, I also upvoted your post!

Do not miss the last post from @hivebuzz:

The Hive community is in mourning. Farewell @lizziesworld!

I think its going to be good

This is really great! I can't wait for this to happen!

This update makes me frisky!

enjoy the pizza!

Great job for a greater hive community.

good job guys!

Honestly we can't wait for it to get started

Thank you for the information @gtg...

Gracias por la información @gtg

That's great 👍

Wow! So high RAM and memory! At least I have my 64 GB of RAM and 4 TB of HDD plus the 450 of SSD and 8GB of Graphic card. I think I can run my witness? But who will support me? No one! LOL. I am willing to help with the HIVE communities... Can I run on my phone? LOL That is so huge!

no1 witness since ages

@gtg. This is a great update and I hoping to see the Eclipse brightening up the whole Hive Community as a whole. Im patiently waiting. Thanks my friend 😊. Weldone sir 💯💯

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