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July 16, 2018, 04:47:24 PM |
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After the recent developments of the past weeks I feel inclined to offer my perspective on it.
Fork 1 (from Forknote to Monero codebase)
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At first glance this fork seemed to be working out well and according to the following message, posted on various social channels, the fork was a success.
The fork has been activated successfully and the difficulty will be set at 120.000 for the next 2000/3000 blocks. Download the source from our GitHub and the binaries will be released by tomorrow.
However, with the network difficulty still at the very high pre-fork value, and barely any mining power left after the fork, the blockchain had become pretty much stuck.
Obviously it is very easy and convenient to contribute this issue to unforeseen circumstances, but the fact of the matter is that with a little bit of research (into other coins that already made to algo switch to CryptonightV7) it would have been pretty easy to predict that this was going to happen. For sure I saw it coming from miles away.
Fork 2 (to fix Fork 1)
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After almost two weeks of waiting, suddenly, and with very little warning or time to prepare, the second fork had been activated already. The most important feature of this fork was to manually lower the difficulty to a reasonable/sensible level, allowing the few remaining miners to finally find some blocks and get the chain moving again.
I would expect the height of the manually fixed diff to be chosen with care and after some thorough deliberation, especially with the recent difficulty debacle from the first fork in mind. Clearly, the choice for a fixed diff of 120000 2 KH/s does not show much care or thought went into it at all.
To illustrate: 2 KH/s...thats about the equivalent of just ONE Vega64 GPU. Not surprisingly, the choice to fix the difficulty this extremely low difficulty caused a mining frenzy, with block times of 1 second, or even less. Subsequently, due to the sheer number of newly found blocks, this caused daemon sync issues for all pools except the official one.
While hoping to be able to mine a bunch of low-diff blocks and make up for some of the losses caused by blockchain being stuck, this was effectively made impossible...except for the official pool, which was able to mine over 5000 easy blocks.
At least, when the normal difficulty calculation kicked back in, this second fork fulfilled its purpose, though it went far from optimal.
Then...last night, v18.06.2 was implemented by the official pool without any prior warning or testing. This caused all other nodes to fall out of sync and display the following error message: Failed to parse transaction from blob. I will assume that this really was unintentional, however, it could have been easily prevented by simply testing it on a testnet, before running it on mainnet.
Wallet Issues
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The most pressing issue right now is to fix the wallet. It has not been working properly, since directly after the first fork several weeks ago...which I have pointed out to you several weeks ago as well. Despite pointing it out, I still did not find any official status update or announcement acknowledging the wallet issues.
In fact, the latest/pinned announcement right now, on your Telegram, Facebook, Twitter and Discord still is this:
The fork has been activated successfully and the difficulty will be set at 120.000 for the next 2000/3000 blocks. Download the source from our GitHub and the binaries will be released by tomorrow.
Judging by that message it would appear like everything is working fine and Leviar doesnt have any problems right now, which is definitely not the case.
So referring to the fork as successful is not only very ignorant and factually untrue, it also damages your credibility. Even more so when this is combined with the absence of an officially statement and acknowledgement of important current issues .
In my opinion it feels a lot like you are being very selective when choosing what news will be published and what wont be published.
I understand very well that this project is under development and technical hiccups and bugs are a part of the process...and I dont have any problems with that. It is bothersome though, that you fail to communicate to your community in a straight-forward, open, honest and professional way. I am sure that this would benefit the project a lot. It will improve your trustworthiness and increase community involvement and faith. It will provide community members with some peace of mind, knowing that you are aware of the issue and working on it
.and if nothing else, it will get rid of many of the constantly recurring questions, simply because you already told people what is going on.
PS.
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Operating and maintaining a mining pool costs time and effort. Renting a server usually isnt free either
.and it takes blood, sweat and tears to attract a decent amount of miners to a pool. So I truly hope you understand that your careless actions of the past weeks are lacking in professionality...and are disrespectful to pool owners as well as miners.
Sincerely,
Crypto-Coins.Club
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