Blockchain Release: HIP 17 Bugfixes

The 2020.12.15.1 release is a bugfix release to add support for HIP17. Please find a detailed breakdown of the bugfixes below.

blockchain-core#697: Fix H3 Index Corruption

Before the team could activate support for HIP 17 in a previous release (you can read more about this here), we realized that the network could run into a potential blockchain halt due to mismatching h3 indexes, which are updated on every add_gateway and assert_location transaction. We had an internal discussion on the impact of this issue and collectively decided to address the bug and postpone HIP 17 activation for a day. Please find the plan below.

The bug was quickly root caused to malformed case clauses in assert_location transaction which were not correctly updating the h3 indexes when a Hotspot's location changed on the network. Please feel free to view the commits on the bug here.

Debugging HIP 17 Variables

The team continues to make improvements in how Hotspot owners can visualize their Hotspot performance and needs to make some blockchain core changes to visualize the rewards scale. As a stop gap, we've modeled all the Hotspots on the network with their corresponding scale values, we currently use this debugging tool to help us understand reward scales at a particular block height. This tool is not updated live and bound to the specific block height that is in the legend (currently: 632627, approximately 2020-12-14 @ 5:47 PM PT).

As mentioned in a prior post, the scale value in the visualization does not apply to overall reward scaling. It is only an indicator for PoC transmission reward scaling. A scale of 0.2 does not mean that a Hotspot's overall rewards will go down by 80%.

Here are some updated images from the tool for reference

Sparse Density Scaling

Variable Scaling

Dense Cluster Scaling

Finally, here's San Francisco with Scaling

miner#580: Adjust Spreading Factor

This release also adjusts spreading factors again to take into account the lack of a LoRaWAN header for PoC. We're including this change in this release since it's a minor code change but a significant improvement for EU Hotspots and a useful improvement for US Hotspots. You can see a past description of spreading factor changes in this old post.

blockchain-core#699: Fix Bad Snapshot Binary Tag

We also fixed the snapshot binary tag which wasn't getting updated correctly therefore doing incorrect deserialization and enhanced the tests to avoid future slippage.

Plan

We began beta testing 2020.12.15.1 around 10:00 AM PT, December 15th, 2020 and plan to deploy to GA on Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 around 3:00 PM PT.

We plan on activating HIP15 and HIP17 chain variables on Wednesday, December 16th, 2020 and will be announcing this change via push notification and on Discord.