The past two months have been some of the most action-packed that you’re likely to find in a blockchain community. The Sia team announced and executed a significant network fork, and merged over 100 new pieces of code — including many from community contributors. Lots of opinions were shared, and good debates were held.

We skipped a community update last month because we were already putting out so much information related to the fork. This update will cover happenings for September and October.

In this update

Developer’s Corner Sia v1.3.7 – the hardfork The exchange situation New software The value of self-help

Updates from the…

Over the past two months, three Nebulous repos were updated. 58 issues were closed, 66 were created, and 101 pieces of code were added to the core codebase. We have a snapshot of updates here, but tbenz’ and hakkane’s official updates can be found weekly in the #announcements channel in Discord.

Also, during the past two months we released our first version of Sia after our move to GitLab!

Notable feature releases

stability and correctness improvements to the renter

support for constructing and signing transactions via the API (and offline, via siac or a hardware wallet)

significant changes to the HostDB’s ranking algorithm; specifically, it improves protection against Sybil attacks (creating many hosts to increase chances of being selected)

better accounts for the collateral posted by hosts

utility functions were added in the form of siac utils , with the goal of creating a “Swiss army knife” for performing various Sia-related tasks

A full list of updates can be found on GitLab. Just click on the version number to get the release notes for each update.

Sia v.1.3.7 — the hardfork

The Sia network hardfork was a success! It executed at block 179,000, which took a bit longer to mine than expected due to the difficulty adjustment kicking in a block late. Block 179,000 was mined just before 6:00 AM EST on November 1st.

So what does this mean? Bitmain, Innosilicon, and all other ASIC manufacturers with the exception of Obelisk have been removed from the network (though those devices are still able to mine forks of Sia). We’ve secured our network from a manufacturer that was, among many other things, unwilling to concede that a single entity mining near or more than 50% of the hashrate is dangerous. And we’ve given a clear signal to the industry that development teams and communities can pave their own way forward.

Update to v1.3.7 to continue on with the Sia network. This is a mandatory update to continue on with the developer-supported fork.

If you’ve been in the dark for a while here, let me give you a quick recap of Sia versions that have been released in the past two months.

v1.3.4: Released on September 6 as a standard update. It introduced over 400 commits, lots of bug fixes and stability improvements, new features and updates to the UI.

v1.3.6: Released on October 16 as the initial fork update. v1.3.5 was simultaneously released with all the same bug fixes and updates, but without the fork code for those who did not want to participate.

v1.3.7: Released on October 22 to address an issue with the difficulty adjustment of 1.3.6.

We’re currently on 1.3.7, and our dev team is working on features for 1.4.0, a significant update for Sia.

The Exchange Situation

Prior to the hardfork, we were able to contact almost every single exchange that had traded Siacoin in the past couple months and get confirmation of their support for v1.3.7. The final tally of pledged v1.3.7 support made up 99.7% of all Siacoin trading volume. We try to balance decentralization with being the primary developers of Sia, and making sure that exchanges were supported during this process was something that we felt was important to maintaining the Sia ecosystem.

There was one exception, CoinEx, that I was not able to reach personally. But judging from their Twitter announcements and suspension of Siacoin trading on October 30th, I believe they participated.

I hope to have another announcement in this area soon, but as always — no promises 😀

The List

Here’s the current list of exchanges that support Siacoin. I keep this up to date, but if you know of any additions or removals please let me know. I’ve recently removed two, QBTC and Haobi, which seem to have simply vanished.

New software

Repertory

Formerly known as SiaDrive, Repertory was updated and released in late September. Repertory allows you to mount Sia blockchain storage solutions via FUSE on Linux/OS X or via WinFSP on Windows. There’s currently a GUI version for Windows, and command-line versions for all operating systems.

Repertory is developed by drexel and is currently in alpha.

Download it here.

Decentralizer

Decentralizer is a tool that analyzes your contract set against a geographic database and allows you to eliminate contracts which share a geographic region. This has the effect of better spreading out your data, and giving you more security and stability on less total redundancy.

Decentralizer is developed by Hakkane and is currently in version 0.2.0.

Download it here.

The value of self-help

We have lots of users. And as much as I trust myself and our support reps, I know that we need help when it comes to dealing with incoming requests. There’s simply too many users out there, which is certainly a good problem to have. We’ll always need additional resources beyond our email support, and that’s ok.

I’ve talked before about the importance of functional support centers, and I wanted to share some numbers with you from the past month of activity at support.sia.tech.

We had over 14,000 article views, by far the highest amount yet. Over 9,600 of those were Navigating the Sia hardfork.

I know this was a bit of an outlier, and things will slowly get back to normal around here, but this shows the power of a single post. Thanks in part to this article serving nearly 10,000 views, we saw (only) a 204% increase in support email volume over the month of October. More importantly, it created nearly 10,000 instances of users getting the right info from the right place.

A belief I hold close is that time is your most important asset. Everyone has it, everyone decides what they’ll do with it, and it comes in limited quantities. If we can reduce the amount of time it takes you to solve your issue on your own — while still creating a positive experience — we’ve succeeded.

It’s time to…

We can now approach the end of the year with the fork behind us, our goals ahead of us, and a renewed focus doing what we do best. If you have any new questions about the fork or anything else, please reach out to us. You can email our stellar support team at hello@sia.tech, or post on Discord or Reddit for answers from the community.

Steve