Call it synchronicity, a confluence of decentralised thinking, or longstanding issues coming to a head, but just as @dirvine was chatting to the team this week about protection against Sybil attacks, a post by @sundata87 popped up alerting us to Vitalik Buterin’s thoughts on the topic. David’s initial response, for those that haven’t read it, is here. Tldr; outside of blockchain-land Sybil may not be so scary after all.
While we’re on helpful community contributions, special thanks to @loziniak for some sharp-eyed bug fixing and useful proposals to simplify the API.
And of course, kudos to everyone who’s taken part in the two testnets over the last week. Yes, we’ve spoiled you – don’t get used to it – but it’s been worth it to find that (a) the no-chunk-nodes situation has improved, if not fully cracked; (b) nodes are earning tokens for primary storage as planned; and (c) useful data on the issues to be ironed out, particularly uploading large files, where it may be that quoted prices can become invalid in the time it takes to chunk and upload the data.
Fixes are on the way, or already in, for those things, as well as the out-of-memory glitch which can occur when encrypting large files.
Oh, and @jimcollinson gave a preview of his product positioning presentation to the team. We’ve really got something special here guys. More soon!
General progress
@qi_ma has implemented streaming for self encryption, a helpful step on the path to ensure clients don’t run out of memory.
@joshuef has been tweaking retries for failed uploads, looking at generalising payment implementation across different types of record, and investigating the logistics of tracking node income.
In adjacent territory, @bochaco raised a PR to add a test verifying total rewards balances after chunk uploads. He also worked on having nodes deposit rewards in their own wallet and a CLI command to query balances.
@bzee refactored the code to optimise getting the furthest record, and investigated store cost calculations and potential supply-demand curves. Ideally we want prices to rise slowly at first then more rapidly as total storage reaches a critical point – all needs testing of course.
Meanwhile, @dirvine has been deep in security territory looking at spam prevention and Sybil and DOS prevention. He’s also been thinking about service providers, such as archive and audit nodes, which are all part of libp2p.
@chriso has made good progress with logging, implementing a combination of Logstash and Filebeat which is much more resource efficient. Chris also raised a PR to rotate logs at 20mb, rather than the number of lines.
@anselme has refactored payments to use UTXO, which is much more efficient than our current DBC implementation as well as being fully encrypted, adapting both sending and receiving ends and identifying security flaws to fix.
As well as lots of internal testing and CI improvements, @roland has been looking at record stores, including validation and error handling. He’s also been testing the new Filebeat and Logstash logging setup with a view to integrating libp2p metrics.
Useful Links
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As an open source project, we’re always looking for feedback, comments and community contributions - so don’t be shy, join in and let’s create the Safe Network together!
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