- We now use our own faster primality test based on Baillie-PSW. The new primality test is based on the 2020 paper ["Strengthening the Baillie-PSW primality test" by Robert Baillie, Andrew Fiori, Samuel S. Wagstaff Jr](https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.14425). The new test works approximately 20% faster than GMP library's mpz_probab_prime_p() function when generating random 1024-bit primes. This lowers the load on Timelords and speeds up VDF verifications in full node.
- Significant improvements have been made to how the full node handles the mempool. This generally cuts CPU usage of node by 2x or more. Part of this increase is that we have temporarily limited the size of transactions. If you want to test sending a transaction you should keep the value of your transaction below 20 TXCH as new consensus will cause you to use a lot of inputs. This will be returned to the expected level as soon as the integration of [clvm rust](https://github.com/Chia-Network/clvm_rs) is complete.
- We have changed the way we compile the proof of space plotter and added one additional optimization. On many modern processors this will mean that using the plotter with the `-e` flag will be 2-3% faster than the Beta 17 plotter on the same CPU. We have found this to be very sensitive to different CPUs but are now confident that, at worst, the Beta 24 plotter with `-e` will be the same speed as Beta 17 if not slightly faster on the same hardware.
- If a peer is not responsive during sync, node will disconnect it.
- Peers that have not sent data in the last hour are now disconnected.
- We have made the "Help Translate" button in the GUI open in your default web browser and added instructions for adding new translations and more phrases in existing translations at that [URL](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/tree/main/electron-react/src/locales). Try the "Help Translate" option on the language selection pull down to the left of the dark/light mode selection at the top right of the GUI.
- Sync store now tracks all connected peers and removes them as they get removed.
- The Rate Limited Wallet has been ported to new consensus and updated Chialisp methods.
- We are down to only one sub dependency that does not ship binary wheels for all four platforms. The only platform still impacted is ARM64 (generally Raspberry Pi) but that only means that you still need the minor build tools as outlined on the [wiki](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/Raspberry-Pi).
- We have upgraded to py-setproctitle 1.2.2. We now have binary wheels for setproctitle on all four platforms and make it a requirement in setup.py. It is run-time optional if you wish to disable it.
- On the Farm page of the GUI Latest Block Challenge is now populated. This shows you the actual challenge that came from the Timelord. Index is the signage point index in the current slot. There are 64 signage points every 10 minutes on average where 32 sub blocks can be won.
- Last Attempted Proof is now fixed. This will show you the last time one of your plots passed the [plot filter](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/FAQ#what-is-the-plot-filter-and-why-didnt-my-plot-pass-it).
- On starting full node, the weight proof cache does not attempt to load all sub blocks. Startup times are noticeably improved though there remains a hesitation when validating the mempool. Our clvm Rust implementation, which will likely ship in the next release, will drop example processing times from 180 to 3 seconds.
- Changes to weight proofs and sub block storage and cacheing required a new database schema. This will require a re-sync or obtaining a synced blockchain_v23.db.
- clvm bytecode is now generated and confirmed that the checked-in clvm and ChiaLisp code matches the CI compiled code.
- We have removed the '-r' flag from `chia` as it was being overridden in most cases by the `-r` for restart flag to `chia start`. Use `chia --root-path` instead.
-`chia -h` now recommends `chia netspace -d 192` which is approximately one hours worth of sub blocks. Use `-d 1000` to get the same estimate of netspace as the RPC and GUI.
-`chia configure` now accepts the shorter `-upnp` and `-log-level` arguments also.
-`chia plots check` now defaults to `-n 30` instead of `-n 1` - HT @eFishCent.
-`chia plots create` now enforces a minimum of k=22. As a reminder, anything less than k=32 is just for testing and be careful extrapolating performance of a k less than 30 to a k=32 or larger.
- We have updated development dependencies for setuptools, yarl, idna, multidict, and chardet.
- We upgraded our fork of aiosqlite to version 16.0 which has significant performance improvements. Our fixes to aiosqlite are waiting to be upstreamed.
-`chia show -c` was showing upload MiB in the download column and vice versa. @pyl and @psydafke deserves credit for insisting it was broken and @kd637xx for the PR assist.
- Node now attempts to pre-validate and cache transactions.
- The harvester will try to not load a plot file that is too small for its k size. This should help keep from partial plots being found when they are copied into a harvester directory. Harvester will check again on the next challenge and find a completed copy of a plot file then.
- We now use bech32m and have added the bech32m tests from Pieter Wuille (@sipa) outlined [here](https://gist.github.com/sipa/14c248c288c3880a3b191f978a34508e) with thanks.
- In the GUI, choosing to parallel plot with a delay now is a delay between the start of the parallel plots started in one session.
- Removed loading plot file names when starting `chia plots create`; decreases plotter time when there are a lot of plots on the machine. Huge thanks to @eFishCent for this PR!
- Various fixes to improve node's ability to sync. There are still plenty of additional performance improvements coming for node so expect it to get easier to run on less powerful devices.
- Wallet now handles large amounts of coins much better and generally syncs better.
- Thanks to @nup002 for the PR to use scientific notation in the logs for address_manager.select_peer timings.
-`chia show -h` now correctly states that you use the first 8 characters of the node id to remove a node on the cli.
- Thank you to @wallentx for adding better help for `chia configure --enable-upnp`.
- Pull requests from forks won't have failures on CI.
- Harvester now only checks every 2 minutes for new files and otherwise caches the plot listing in memory and logs how long it took to load all plot files at INFO level.
- Harvester multithreading is now configureable in config.yaml.
- Weight proofs were failing to verify contributing to a chain stall. This release gets things moving again but nodes are using too much CPU and can pause/lag at times. This may resolve as people upgrade to Beta 21.
- A toxic combination of transaction limits set too high and a non performant clvm kept the chain stalled. A faster rust implementation of clvm is already nearing completion.
-`chia netspace -s` would not correctly look up the start block height by block hash. Additionally netspace now flips to PiB above 1024 TiB. To compare netspace to `chia show` of the GUI use `chia netspace -d 1000` as `chia netspace` defaults to `-d 192` which is one hour.
- If harvester hits an exception it will be caught, logged and skipped. This normally happens if it attempts to harvest a plot file you are still copying in.
- The Rate Limited wallet has been updated to work in new consensus.
- There was a bug in block reorg code that would keep a peer with a lower weight chain from validating and syncing to a higher weight chain when the node thought it had a double spend in the other chain. This caused a persistent chain split.
- Welcome to the new consensus. This release is an all but a full re-write of the blockchain in under 30 days. There is now only one tip of the blockchain but we went from two chains to three. Block times are now a little under a minute but there are a couple of sub blocks between each transaction block. A block is also itself a special kind of sub block and each sub block rewards the farmer who won it 1 TXCH. Sub blocks come, on average, about every 17 to 18 seconds.
- Starting with this Beta, there are 4608 opportunities per day for a farmer to win 1 TXCH compared to Beta 18 where there were 288 opportunities per day for a farmer to win 16 TXCH.
- There is a lot more information and explanation of the new consensus algorithm in the New Consensus Working Document linked from [chia.net](https://chia.net/). Among the improvements this gives the Chia blockchain are a much higher security level against all attacks, more frequent transaction blocks that have less time variation between them and are then buried under confirmations (sub blocks also count towards re-org security) much more quickly.
- New consensus means this is a very hard fork. All of your TXCH from Beta 17/18 will be gone. Your plots and keys will work just fine however. You will have to sync to the new chain.
- You now have to sync 16 times more "blocks" for every 5 minutes of historical time so syncing is slower than it was on the old chain. We're aware of this and will be speeding it up and addressing blockchain database growth in the nest couple of releases.
- Prior to this Beta 19, we had block times that targeted 5 minutes and rewarded 16 TXCH to one farmer. Moving forward we have epoch times that target 10 minutes and reward 32 TXCH to 32 farmers about every 17-18 seconds over that period. This has subtle naming and UI impacts in various places.
- Total transaction throughput is still targeted at 2.1x Bitcoin's throughput per hour but you will get more confirmations on a transaction much faster. This release has the errata that it doesn't limit transaction block size correctly.
- For testing purposes this chain is quickly halving block rewards. By the time you're reading this and using the chain, farmers and pools will be receiving less than 1 TXCH for each block won as if it were 15-20 years from now. Block rewards are given in two components, 7/8's to the pool key and 1/8 to the farmer. The farmer also receives any transaction fees from the block.
- You can now plot in parallel using the GUI. A known limitation is that you can't yet specify that you want 4 sets of two parallel plots. Each parallel plot added starts immediately parallel. We will continue to improve this.
- You can now specify which private key to use for `chia plots create`. After obtaining the fingerprint from `chia keys show`, try `chia plots create -a FINGERPRINT`. Thanks to @eFishCent for this pull request!
- We use a faster hash to prime function for chiavdf from the current release of gmp-6.2.1 which we have upgraded chiavdf and blspy to support.
- There is a new cli command - `chia configure`. This allows you to update certain configuration details like log level in config.yaml from the command line. This is particularly useful in containerization and linux automation. Try `chia configure -h`. Note that if chia services are running and you issue this command you will have to restart them for changes to take effect but you can use this command in the venv when no services are running or call it directly by path in the venv without activating the venv. Expect the options for this command to expand.
- The Plot tab on the GUI is now the Plots tab. It starts out with a much more friendly new user wizard and otherwise keeps all of your farming plots listed here. Use the "+ ADD A PLOT" button in the top right to plot your second or later plot.
- The new plots page offers advanced plotting options in the various "Show Advanced Options" fold outs.
- The plotter supports the new bitfield back propagation method and the old method from Beta 17. To choose the old method add a `-e` to the command line or choose "Disable bitfield plotting" in "Show Advanced Options" of the Plots tab. Bitfield back propagation writes about 13% less total writes and can be faster on some slower hard drive temp spaces. For now, SSD temp space will likely plot faster with bitfield back propagation disabled. We will be returning to speed enhancements to the plotter as we approach and pass our mainnet launch.
- The Farm tab in the GUI is significantly enhanced. Here you have a dashboard overview of your farm and your activity in response to challenges blockchain challnegs, how long it will take you - on average - to win a block, and how much TXCH you've won so far. Harvester and Full Node connections have moved to Advanced Options.
- Harvester and farmer will start when the GUI starts instead of waiting for key selection if there are already keys available. This means you will start farming on reboot if you have the Chia application set to launch on start.
- Tests now place a cache of blocks and plots in the ~/.chia/ directory to speed up total testing time.
- Changes were made to chiapos to correctly support the new bitfiled backpropogation on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. With the exception of needing to work around python cryptography as outlined on the wiki, FreeBSD and OpenBSD should be able to compile and run chia-blockchain.
- With the change to new consensus many components of the chain and local database are not yet stored optimally. Startup and sync times may be slower than usual so please be patient. This will improve next release.
- Errata: Coinbase amount is missing from the GUI Block view.
- Eratta: wallet Backup, and Fly-sync on the wallet are currently not working.
- There was a regression in Beta 18 where the plotter took 499GiB of temp space for a k32 when it used to only use 332GiB. The plotter should now use just slightly less than it did in Beta 17.
- F1 generation in the plotter is now fully parallel for a small speedup.
- We have bitfield optimized phase 2 of plotting. There is only about a 1% increase in speed from this change but there is a 12% decrease in writes with a penalty of 3% more reads. More details in [PR 120](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chiapos/pull/120). Note that some sorts in phase 2 and phase 3 will now appear "out of order" and that is now expected behavior.
- Partial support for Python 3.9. That includes new versions of Chia dependencies like chiabip158.
### Changed
- We have moved from using gulrak/filesystem across all platforms to only using it on MacOS. It's required on MacOS as we are still targeting Mojave compatibility. This should resolve Windows path issues.
- We upgraded to cbor 5.2.0 but expect to deprecate cbor in a future release.
- A segfault caused by memory leaks in bls-library has been fixed. This should end the random farmer and harvester crashes over time as outlined in [Issue 500](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/issues/500).
- Starting with recent setuptools fixes, we can no longer pass an empty string to the linker on Windows when building binary wheels in the sub repos. Thanks @jaraco for tracking this down.
- In the GUI there was [a regression](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/issues/484) that removed the scroll bar on the Plot page. The scroll bar has returned!
- In Dark Mode you couldn't read the white on white plotting log text.
- To fix a bug in Beta 15's plotter we introduced a fixed that slowed plotting by as much as 25%.
- Certain NTFS root mount points couldn't be used for plotting or farming.
- Logging had [a regression](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/issues/485) where log level could no longer be set by service.
- The GUI now supports translations and localizations. If you'd like to add your language you can see the examples in [the locales directory](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/tree/dev/electron-react/src/locales) of the chia-blockchain repository.
-`chia check plots` now takes a `-g` option that allows you to specify a matching path string to only check a single plot file, a wild card list of plot files, or all plots in a single directory instead of the default behavior of checking every directory listed in your config.yaml. A big thank you to @eFishCent for this pull request!
- Better documentation of the various timelord options in the default config.yaml.
- Updated to chiapos 0.12.32. This update significantly speeds up the F1/first table plot generation. It also now can log disk usage while plotting and generate graphs. More details in the [chiapos release notes](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chiapos/releases/tag/0.12.32).
- Node losing or not connecting to another peer node (which is entirely normal behaviour) is now logged at INFO and not WARNING. Your logs will be quieter.
- SSL Certificate handling was refactored along with Consensus constants, service launching, and internal configuration management.
- Updated to clvm 0.5.3. This fixed a bug in the `point_add` operator, that was causing taproot issues. This also removed the `SExp.is_legit_list` function. There were significant refactoring of various smart transactions for simplicity and efficiency.
- WalletTool was generally removed.
- Deprecated pep517.build for the new standard `python -m build --sdist --outdir dist .`
- A bug in bls-singatures/blspy could cause a stack overflow if too many signatures were verified at once. This caused the block of death at 11997 of the Beta 15 chain. Updated to 0.2.4 to address the issue.
- chiapos 0.12.32 fixed a an out of bounds read that could crash the plotter. It also contains a fix to better handle the case of drive letters on Windows.
- On NTFS, plotting and farming can't use a path that includes a non root mountpoint. This is fixed in an upcoming version but did not have enough testing time for this release.
- Node peers are now gossiped between nodes with logic to keep connected nodes on disparate internet networks to partially protect from eclipse attacks. This is the second to last step to remove our temporary introducer and migrate to DNS introducers with peer gossip modeled directly off of Bitcoin. This adds a new database of valid peer nodes that will persist across node restarts. This also makes changes to config.yaml's contents.
- For 'git clone' installs there is now a separate install-gui.sh which speeds up running install.sh for those who wish to run headless and makes docker and other automation simpler.
- Multithreading support in chiapos, as well as a new algorithm which is faster and does 70% less IO. This is a significant improvement in speed, much lower total writing, and configurability for different hardware environments.
- Default -b changed to 3072 to improve performance
- The correct amount of memory is used for plotting
- Block timestamps are now stored in the wallet database. Both database versions were incremented and databases from previous versions will not work with Beta 14. However, upon re-sync all test chia since Beta 12 should appear in your wallet.
- When starting the GUI from an installer or the command line on Linux, if you had not previously generated a key on your machine, the generate new key GUI would not launch and you would be stuck with a spinner.
- You can now backup your wallet related metadata in an encrypted and signed file to a free service from Chia Network at backup.chia.net. Simply having a backup of your private key will allow you to fully restore the state of your wallet including coloured coins, rate limited wallets, distributed identity wallets and many more. Your private key is used to automatically restore the last backup you saved to the Chia backup cloud service. This service is open source and ultimately you will be able to configure your backups to go to backup.chia.net, your own installation, or a third party's version of it.
- This is a new blockchain as we changed how the default puzzle hashes are generated and previous coins would not be easy to spend. Plots made with Beta 8 and newer continue to work, but all previous test chia are left on the old chain and do not migrate over. Configuration data like plot directories automatically migrate in your `~/.chia` directory.
- Proof of Space now requires significantly less temp space to generate a new plot. A k=32 that used to require 524GiB now requires only 313GiB - generally a 40% decrease across all k sizes.
- When plotting, instead of 1 monolithic temp file, there are now 8 files - one for each of the 7 tables and one for sorting plot data. These files are deleted as the `-2` or `-d` final file is written so the final file can fit within the footprint of the temporary files on the same filesystem.
- We've made various additional CPU optimizations to the Proof of Space plotter that reduces plotting time by an additional 13%. These changes will also reduce CPU utilization in harvesting.
- The Chia UI now has a proper About menu entry that gives the various component versions and directs people to submit issues on GitHub. Thank you to @freddiecoleman for this pull request!
- To complement the new About menu, we have revamped all Electron menus and made them OS native. There are now direct links to the Wiki, Keybase, and FAQ in the Help menu.
- There are minor improvements to how working space is calculated and displayed by the plotter. The plotter also has additional debugging information in its output.
- kOffsetSize should have been 10 bits and not 9. This was causing plots, especially larger plots, to fail with "Error 0". This bug was introduced in Beta 8 with the new plot file format.
- Meet our new Rate Limited wallet. You can now fund a wallet from an Admin wallet that will set how many coins can be spent over a given range of blocks for a given User wallet. Once combined with on chain wallet recovery, this makes it much easier to secure your "spending money" wallet so that if it is compromised you have time to get most of the funds back before an attacker can steal them all. This wallet should be considered alpha in this release as additional fixes and functionality will be coming in subsequent releases.
- We've added unhardened HD keys to bls-signatures for the smart wallets that need them. We've added significant cross project testing to our BLS implementation.
- The python implementation of bls-signatures is now current to the new specification.
-`chia show -b` now returns plot public key and pool public key for each block.
- Added cbor2 binary wheels for ARM64 to the Chia simple site. Raspberry Pi should be just a little easier to install.
- Wallet addresses and other key related elements are now expressed in Chech32 which is the Chia implementation of [Bech32](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0173.mediawiki). All of your old wallet addresses will be replaced with the new Chech32 addresses. The only thing you can't do is send test chia between 1.8/1.9 and 1.10 software. Anyone who upgrades to 1.10 will keep their transactions and balances of test chia from the earlier two releases however.
- We added a first few enhancements to plotting speed. For a k=30 on a ramdisk with `-b 64 GiB` it results in an 11% speedup in overall plotting speed and a 23% improvement in phase 1 speed. Many more significant increases in plotting speed are in the works.
- The proof of space document in chiapos has been updated to the new format and edited for clarity. Additionally GitHub actions now has the on demand ability to create the PDF version.
- Relic has upstreamed our changes required for the IETF BLS standard. We now build directly from the Relic repository for all but Windows and will be migrating Windows in the next release.
- Minor improvements to the Coloured Coin wallet were integrated in advance of an upcoming re-factor.
- Smart wallet backup was upgraded to encrypt and sign the contents of the backup.
- The Windows installer is now signed by a Chia Network certificate. It may take some time to develop enough reputation to not warn multiple times during install.
- Test plots for the simulation and testing harness now go into `~/.chia/test-plots/`
- We have completely refactored all networking code towards making each Chia service use the same default networking infrastructure and move to websockets as the default networking wire protocol.
- We added additional improvements and more RPCs to the start daemon and various services to continue to make chia start/stop reliable cross platform.
- For GitHub ci builds of the Windows installer, editbin.exe is more reliably found.
- All installer ci builds now obtain version information automatically from setuptools_scm and convert it to an installer version number that is appropriate for the platform and type of release (dev versus release.)
- We now codesign the Apple .dmg installer with the Chia Network developer ID on both GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines. We will be notarizing and distributing the Azure Pipelines version as it's built on MacOS Mojave (10.14.6) for stronger cross version support.
- Windows and MacOS now have one click installers that then send users to a GUI on both platforms to farm or use their wallets. Windows is built on GitHub Actions and MacOS is also built on Azure Pipelines so as to build on Mojave.
- You can see and control your farmer, harvester, and plotter from the GUI on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
- We added a new keychain system that replaces keys.yaml, and migrates existing users from keys.yaml. It utilizes each OS's keychain for slightly more secure key storage.
- We added a `chia keys` command line program, to see, add, and remove private keys.
- We added RPC servers and RPC client implementations for Farmer and Harvester. The new UI uses these for additional information and functionality.
- We added total network storage space estimation to the node RPC at the `/get_network_space` endpoint instead of only being available in the cli. The RPC endpoint takes two block header hashes and estimates space between those header hashes.
- We now have a CHANGELOG.md that adheres closely to the [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.0.0/) standard. We merged in the version history and updated some previous release notes to capture items important to the change log. We are modifying our release process to accumulate changes at the top of the change log and then copy those to the release notes at the time of the release.
- We added [lgtm](https://lgtm.com/) source analysis on pull request to the chia-blockchain, chiapos, chiavdf, chiabip158, and bls-library repositories to add some automated security analysis to our ci.
- We replaced the Electron/JavaScript interface with a React user interface which is cleaner and more responsive.
- We now have a multithreaded harvester to farm more plots concurrently. This is especially faster when there are multiple disks being harvested. The class is also made thread safe with mutex guards. This is achieved by releasing GIL in the python bindings when fetching qualities and proofs. We estimate that the former guidance of only 50 plots per physical drive should be updated to 250-350 plots per physical drive. We will continue to improve the plots per physical drive limit during the beta period.
- Syncing a node is now much faster and uses less memory.
-`chia netspace` has been refactored to use the `/get_network_space` RPC. The command
- The Full node RPC response formats have been changed. All API calls now return a dict with success, and an additional value, for example {"success": True, "block": block}.
- create plots now takes in an optional sk_seed, it is no longer read in from keys.yaml. If not passed in, it is randomly generated. The -i argument can now only be used when you provide an sk_seed.
- In beta 1.5 we introduced a bug in aggsig and aggsig-me that we have fixed in this release. That forced a hard fork of the chain so coins and balances are lost from beta 1.5. There is no impact on existing plots.
- Fixed and issue where [Relic](https://github.com/relic-toolkit/relic) and thus blspy would crash on processors older than Haswell as they don't support lzc.
- Some non-critical networking errors are no longer logged.
- The `install-timelord.sh` script now correctly determines which version of python it is running under and correctly builds vdf_client and correctly links to vdf_bench. It also handles upgrading CMake on Ubuntu's older than 20.04LTS do satisfy the new CMake 3.14+ requirement to build Timelord.
- We have added an option to `chia-create-plots` to specify the second temporary directory. Creating a plot is a three step process. First a working file ending in `.dat.tmp` is created. This file is usually 5 times larger than the final plot file. In the later stages of plotting a second temp file is created ending in `.dat.2.tmp` which will grow to the size of the final plot file. In the final step, the `.dat.2.tmp` is copied to the final `.dat` plot file. You can now optionally set the directory for the `.dat.2.tmp` file with the `-2` flag. An example use case is plotting on a ramdisk and writing both the second temp file and the final file out to an SSD - `chia-create-plots -n 1 -k 30 -t /mnt/ramdisk -2 /mnt/SSD -d /mnt/SSD`.
-`chia init` properly migrates from previous versions including the k>=32 workaround. Additionally, the farming target key is checked to make sure that it is the valid and correct public key format.
- We have implemented a workaround for the `chia start` issues some were having upon crash or reboot. We will be rebuilding start and stop to be robust across platforms.
- This release re-includes `chia-start-harvester`.
- Coloured coins now have a prefix to help identify them. When sending transactions, the new prefix is incompatible with older clients.
- The user interface now refers to chia coins with their correct currency code of XCH.
- The next release will now be in the dev branch instead of the e.g. beta-1.5. Additionally we are enforcing linear merge into dev and prefer rebase merges or partial squash merges of particularly chatty commit histories.
- There was a regression in Chia Proof of Space ([chiapos](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chiapos)) that came from our efforts to speed up plotting on Windows native. Now k>=32 plots work correctly. We made additional bug fixes and corrected limiting small k size generation.
- There was a bug in Timelord handling that could stop all VDF progress.
- We have made significant changes to the full node database to make it more reliable and quicker to restart. This requires re-syncing the current chain. If you use `chia init` then sync on first start will happen automatically. "\$CHIA_ROOT" users will need to delete `$CHIA_ROOT/db/*` before starting Beta 1.5. This also fixes the simulation issue in Beta 1.4 where tips could go "back in time."
- uPnP support on Windows may be broken. However, Windows nodes will be able to connect to other nodes and, once connected, participate fully in the network.
- Currently, there is no way to restore a Coloured Coin Wallet.
- This release adds Coloured coin support with offers. Yes that is the correct spelling. Coloured coins allow you to issue a coin, token, or asset with nearly unlimited issuance plans and functionality. They support inner smart transactions so they can inherit any of the other functionality you can implement in Chialisp. Offers are especially cool as they create a truly decentralized exchange capability. Read much more about them in Bram's [blog post on Coloured coins](https://chia.net/2020/04/29/coloured-coins-launch.en.html).
- This release adds support for native Windows via a (mostly) automated installer and MacOS Mojave. Windows still requires some PowerShell command line use. You should expect ongoing improvements in ease of install and replication of the command line tools in the GUI. Again huge thanks to @dkackman for continued Windows installer development. Native Windows is currently slightly slower than the same version running in WSL 2 on the same machine for both block verification and plotting.
- We made some speed improvements that positively affected all platforms while trying to increase plotting speed in Windows.
- The graphical Full Node display now shows the expected finish times of each of the prospective chain tips.
- Now you can run estimates of the total space currently farming the network. Try `chia netspace -d 12` to run an estimate over the last 12 blocks which is approximately 1 hour.
- We’ve added TLS authentication for incoming farmer connections. TLS certs and keys are generated during chia init and only full nodes with your keys will be able to connect to your Farmer. Also, Harvester, Timelord, and Wallet will now not accept incoming connections which reduces the application attack surface.
- The node RPC has a new endpoint get_header_by_height which allows you to retrieve the block header from a block height. Try `chia show -bh 1000` to see the block header hash of block 1000. You can then look up the block details with `chia show -b f655e1a9f7f8c89a703e40d9ce82ae33508badaf7b37fa1a56cad27926b5e936` which will look up a block by it's header hash.
- Our Windows binaries check the processor they are about to run on at runtime and choose the best processor optimizations for our [MPIR](http://mpir.org/) VDF dependency on Windows.
- Most of the content of README.md and INSTALL.md have been moved to the [repository wiki](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki) and placed in [INSTALL](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/INSTALL) and [Quick Start Guide](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/Quick-Start-Guide)
- Harvester is now asynchronous and will better be able to look up more plots spread across more physical drives.
- Full node startup time has been sped up significantly by optimizing the loading of the blockchain from disk.
- Most scripts have been removed in favor of chia action commands. You can run `chia version` or `chia start node` for example. Just running `chia` will show you more options. However `chia-create-plots` continues to use the hyphenated form. Also it's now `chia generate keys` as another example.
- Chia start commands like `chia start farmer` and `chia stop node` now keep track of process IDs in a run/ directory in your configuration directory. `chia stop` is unlikely to work on Windows native for now. If `chia start -r node` doesn't work you can force the run/ directory to be reset with `chia start -f node`.
- We suggest you take a look at our [Upgrading documentation](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/Updating-beta-software) if you aren't performing a new install.
- blspy now has libsodium included in the MacOS and Linux binary wheels.
- miniupnpc and setprotitle were dynamically checked for an installed at runtime. Removed those checks and we rely upon the install tools installing them before first run.
- Windows wheels that the Windows Installer packages are also available in the ci Artifacts in a .zip file.
- The script `chia start wallet-gui` has been chaned to `chia start wallet` which launches but the GUI and server on MacOS and Linux. `chia start wallet-server` remains for WSL 2 and Windows native.
- This release breaks the wire protocol so it comes with a new chain. As we merged in Coloured coins we found that we needed to change how certain hashes were managed. Your 1.0beta3 coin balances will be lost when you upgrade but your plots will continue to work on the 1.0beta4 chain. Since we had to make a breaking wire protocol change we accelerated changing our hash to prime function for starting proofs of time. That was also going to be a future breaking change.
- Plots of k>=32 are not working for farming, and some broken plots can cause a memory leak. A [workaround is available](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/Beta-1.4-k=32-or-larger-work-around).
- If you are running a simulation, blockchain tips are not saved in the database and this is a regression. If you stop a node it can go back in time and cause an odd state. This doesn't practically effect testnet participation as, on restart, node will just sync up a few blocks to the then current tips.
- uPnP support on Windows may be broken. However, Windows nodes will be able to connect to other nodes and, once connected, participate fully in the network.
- Coins are not currently reserved as part of trade offers and thus could potentially be spent before the offer is accepted resulting in a failed offer transaction.
- Currently, there is no way to restore a Coloured Coin Wallet.
- The `chia stop all` command sometimes fails, use `chia-stop-all` instead. In windows, use the task manager to stop the servers.
- Windows, WSL 2, Linux and MacOS installation is significantly streamlined. There is a new Windows installer for the Wallet GUI (huge thanks to @dkackman).
- All installs can now be from the source repository or just the binary dependencies on WSL 2, most modern Linuxes, and MacOS Catalina. Binary support is for both Python 3.7 and 3.8.
- There is a new migration tool to move from Beta1 (or 2) to Beta3. It should move everything except your plots.
- There is a new command `chia init` that will migrate files and generate your initial configuration. If you want to use the Wallet or farm, you will also have to `chia-generate-keys`. You can read step by step instructions for [upgrading from a previous beta release](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/Updating-beta-software). If you've set `$CHIA_ROOT` you will have to make sure your existing configuration remains compatible manually.
- Wallet has improved paper wallet recovery support.
- We now also support restoring old wallets with only the wallet_sk and wallet_target. Beta3's Wallet will re-sync from scratch.
- We've made lots of little improvements that should speed up node syncing
-`chia-restart-harvester` has been renamed from `chia-start-harvester` to better reflect its functionality. Use it to restart a harvester that's farming so that it will pick up newly finished plots.
- You should not copy over any prior Wallet database as they are not compatible with Beta3. Your existing full node will not have to re-sync and its database remains compatible.
- Among a lot of bug fixes was removing a regression that slowed plotting on MacOS by 3 times and may have had smaller impacts on plotting speed on other platforms.
- We've removed some race conditions in the Wallet
- We resolved the "invalid blocks could disconnect farmers" bug
- We and upped the default tls certificate size to 2048 for some unhappy operating systems.
- Windows native is close but not here yet. Also, we should be adding back MacOS Mojave support shortly.
- So why is this Beta 3 you're wondering? Well, we're getting used to our new release management tools and a hotfix devoured our beta2 nomenclature... We've marked it YANKED here.
- If you previously used the plot_root variable in config, your plot directory names might not migrate correctly. Please double check the filenames in `~/.chia/beta-1.0b3/config/plots.yaml` after migrating
- There is now full transaction support on the Chia blockchain. In this initial Beta 1.0 release, all transaction types are supported though the wallets and UIs currently only directly support basic transactions like coinbase rewards and sending coins while paying fees. UI support for our [smart transactions](https://github.com/Chia-Network/wallets/blob/main/README.md) will be available in the UIs shortly.
- Wallet and Node GUI’s are available on Windows, Mac, and desktop Linux platforms. We now use an Electron UI that is a full light client wallet that can also serve as a node UI. Our Windows Electron Wallet can run standalone by connecting to other nodes on the network or another node you run. WSL 2 on Windows can run everything except the Wallet but you can run the Wallet on the native Windows side of the same machine. Also the WSL 2 install process is 3 times faster and _much_ easier. Windows native node/farmer/plotting functionality are coming soon.
- If you’re a farmer you can use the Wallet to keep track of your earnings. Either use the same keys.yaml on the same machine or copy the keys.yaml to another machine where you want to track of and spend your coins.
- We have revamped the chia management command line. To start a farmer all you have to do is start the venv with `. ./activate` and then type `chia-start-farmer &`. The [README.md](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/blob/main/README.md) has been updated to reflect the new commands.
- We have moved all node to node communication to TLS 1.3 by default. For now, all TLS is unauthenticated but certain types of over the wire node to node communications will have the ability to authenticate both by certificate and by inter protocol signature. Encrypting over the wire by default stops casual snooping of transaction origination, light wallet to trusted node communication, and harvester-farmer-node communication for example. This leaves only the mempool and the chain itself open to casual observation by the public and the various entities around the world.
- Configuration directories have been moved to a default location of HomeDirectory/.chia/release/config, plots/ db/, wallet/ etc. This can be overridden by `export CHIA_ROOT=~/.chia` for example which would then put the plots directory in `HomeDirectory/.chia/plots`.
- The libraries chia-pos, chia-fast-vdf, and chia-bip-158 have been moved to their own repositories: [chiapos](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chiapos), [chiavdf](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chiavdf), and [chaibip158](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chiabip158). They are brought in by chia-blockchain at install time. Our BLS signature library remains at [bls-signatures](https://github.com/Chia-Network/bls-signatures).
- The install process now brings in chiapos, chiavdf, etc from Pypi where they are auto published via GitHub Actions ci using cibuildwheel. Check out `.github/workflows/build.yml` for build methods in each of the sub repositories.
-`chia-regenerate-keys` has been renamed `chia-generate-keys`.
- setproctitle is now an optional install dependency that we will continue to install in the default install methods.
- The project now defaults to `venv` without the proceeding . to better match best practices.
- Developer requirements were separated from the actual requirements.
-`install-timelord.sh` has been pulled out from `install.sh`. This script downloads the source python package for chiavdf and compiles it locally for timelords. vdf_client can be included or excluded to make building normal user wheels easier.
- The Beta release is not compatible with the history of the Alpha blockchain and we will be ceasing support of the Alpha chain approximately two weeks after the release of this Beta. However, your plots and keys are fully compatible with the Beta chain. Please save your plot keys! Examples of how to save your keys and upgrade to the Beta are available on the [repo wiki](https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki).
- The ssh ui and web ui are removed in favor of the cli ui and the Electron GUI. To mimic the ssh ui try `chia show -s -c` and try `chia show --help` for usage instructions.
- We have removed the inkfish vdf implementation and replaced it with the pybind11 C++ version.
- Wallet currently has limited support for restoring from a paper wallet. Wallet uses hierarchically deterministic keys, and assumes that any keys that are at index "higher than one" have not been used yet. If you have received a payment to an address associated with a key at a higher index and you want it to appear in Wallet, the current work around is to press the "NEW ADDRESS" button multiple times shortly after sync start. That will make wallet "aware of" addresses at higher indexes. Full support for paper wallet restoration will be added soon.
- We. Don't... Have.. Windows.... Native. YET!?! But the entire project is compiling on Windows 10 natively. Assistance would be more than appreciated if you have experience building binary python wheels for Windows. We are pushing some limits like uint-128, avx-2, avx-512, and AES-NI so it's not as easy as it looks...
- You can now provide an index to create_plots using the -i flag to create an arbitrary new plot derived from an existing plot key. Thanks @xorinox.
- There is a new restart_harvester.sh in scripts/ to easily restart a harvester when you want to add a newly completed plot to the farm without restarting farmer, fullnode, timelord, etc.
- Harvesters now log errors if they encounter a malformed or corrupted plot file. Again thanks @xorinox.
- New AJAX based full node UI. To access go to [http://127.0.0.1:8555/index.html](http://127.0.0.1:8555/index.html) with any modern web browser on the same machine as the full node.
- If you want to benchmark your CPU as a VDF you can use vdf_bench square_asm 500000 for the assembly optimized test or just vdf_bench square 500000 for the plain C++ code path. This tool is found in lib/chiavdf/fast_vdf/.
- Improvements to shutting down services in all of the scripts in scripts/. Another @xorinox HT.
- VDF verification code is improved and is now more paranoid.
- Timelords can now be run as a cluster of VDF client instances around a central Timelord instance.. Instructions are available in the Cluster Timelord section of the repo wiki.
- Due to changes to the sqlite database that are not backwards compatible, re-synch will be required.
- Loading the blockchain only loads headers into memory instead of header blocks (header + proofs), speeds up the startup, and reduces normal operation memory usage by 80%.
- Memory access is now synchronous to reduce use of locks and speed up block processing.
- Chia fullnode, farmer and harvester now default to logging to chia.log in the chia-blockchain directory. This is configured in config.yaml and due to config.yaml changes it is recommended to edit the new template config instead of using older config.yaml’s from previous versions.
- uvloop is now an optional add on.
- Harvester/farmer will not try to farm plots that they don’t have the key for.
- FullNode performance improvements - Syncing up to the blockchain by importing all blocks is faster due to improvements in VDF verification speed and multithreading block verification.
- VDF improvements - VDF verification and generation speed has increased and dependence on flint2 has been removed. We wish to thank Dr. William Hart (@wbhart) for dual licensing parts of his contributions in FLINT and Antic for inclusion in the Chia blockchain.
- Changed the displayed process names for harvester, farmer, fullnode, timelords, and VDFs to to chia_full node, chia_harvester, etc. Fixed a bug that could cause inadvertent shutdown of other processes like an ongoing plotting session when new chia services were started.
- Clarified the minimum version of boost required to build timelord/VDFs. Hat tip @AdrianScott
- Mongodb removed and replaced with SQLite for the blockchain database. This will require nodes to re-sync with the network. Luckily this is now faster.
- FullNode: A long running or low ulimit situation could cause an “out of files” issue which would stop new connection creation. Removed the underlying socket leak.
