Since its launch on June 23, Silicoin has had some minor successes with many miners and community involvement. The current network space has reached 150 PiB and has been rising steadily.
In the past two weeks, we carefully read all the discussions and suggestions about Silicoin in Discord, Telegram, and some chia forums. We are very grateful for the enthusiasm and support of the community, which makes us very impressed.
For example, we made changes to the GUI that improved the user’s visual experience with the help of @ProdigalGrim, a community member from Discord.
As the community grew, we found that Silicoin's port conflicted with another Chia fork. Although users can change this port manually, we finally made some modifications in the 0.05 version because we consider the operation and the maximization of mining benefits for Silicoin miners.
Besides, we found that all Chia forks have some problems in full node synchronization. It is related to the integration of many traditional P2P ideas and practices in the Chia network. In response to this problem, we have also made more optimizations. As a result, the current version of v0.05 is not perfect, but the experience has been a significant improvement compared to before.
In addition to some updates to the mining part of the code, we also made some changes to the application node. The most significant adjustment is to make the application node to be the timelord. Regarding the timelord, we do some research:
- The fastest configuration of Chia mainnet: 200k-210k IPs, Intel Core i9-10900K with 16G RAM
- Developer environment: 115.9K IPs (mbp 2019, 2.3 GHz i9)
- The current situation of the Silicoin testnet: 90.56k, 2.5G AMD
Since running a timelord requires CPU usage, our recommendation is a physical server with 8 cores and 16G memory. It is worth noting that this does not mean that it is necessary to run a timelord. It is merely a recommendation for long-term development.
Although we have made many adjustments and optimizations in the past few days, we found a more severe problem through community feedback: The hard drives passing filters too often.
It was caused by the problem that we set more filters in Testnet 1 to test our network. We planned to fix this issue on Testnet 2, because we did not expect that there is a large number of users joined our community suddenly. Some miners have suspended mining and waited for our next version upgrade because this issue will harm the hard drive. There is even a joke in the community that Silicoin’s color is NOT GREEN because of that :D
Although our LOGO and GUI are not green, we are green indeed. To protect the rights and interests of miners, we are now working with this problem and reducing the number of filters. We expect it will be fixed within this week.
We will take a snapshot when the block height reaches 93939 to ensure no one loses any tSIT you have already earned, which will not increase or decrease in Testnet 1.5. And then, Silicoin will enter the new network - the Testnet 1.5 phase.
When will the testnet2 with staking be launched?
According to our previous words, the testnet2 will be launched before August. The codes related to staking have been nearly completed. So the development will not be affected. Regarding the specific launch time of Testnet 2, we are going to study and test Chia’s new mining pool protocol standards in detail and make corresponding code adjustments to the Silicoin network (such as supporting new Plot, etc.). After these are well prepared, there is a specific launch date. We believe that will not be later than September.
Last but not least, we sincerely thank all Silicoin community members once again. Your feedback allows us to review ourselves, and your suggestions help us go-ahead. We saw the power of the community in the past few days, and we hope that more and more miners can join us. Thus, we will launch a plan of Community Incentives mentioned in the whitepaper on July 15. The 1.2 million tSIT reserved in Testnet 1&2 will be fully shared with our community members who contributed to the Silicoin network. For more details, please pay attention to the official announcement of Silicoin in the future.