1.0beta8

[1.0beta8] aka Beta 1.8 - 2020-07-16

Added

• We have released a new plot file format. We believe that plots made in this
  format and with these IETF BLS keys will work without significant changes
  on mainnet at launch.
• We now use chacha8 and blake3
  for proof of space instead of the now deprecated AES methods. This shoul
  increase plotting speed and support more processors.
• Plot refreshing happens during all new challenges and only new/modified files are read.
• Updated blspy to use the
  new IETF standard for BLS signatures.
• Added a faster VDF process which generates n-wesolowski proofs quickly
  after the VDF result is known. This requires a high number of CPUs. To use it,
  set timelord.fast_algorithm = True in the config file.
• Added a new type of timelord helper - blue boxes, which generate compact
  proofs of time for existing proven blocks. This helps reducing the database
  size and speeds up syncing a node for new users joining the network. Full nodes
  send 100 random un-compact blocks per hour to blue boxes, and if
  timelord.sanitizer_mode = True, the blue box timelord will work on those
  challenges. Unlike the main timelord, average machines can run blue boxes
  and contribute to the chain. Expect improvements to the install method for
  blue boxes in future releases.
• From the UI you can add a directory that harvester will always check for
  existing and new plots. Harvester will only look in the specific directory you
  specify so you'll have to add any subfolders you want to also contain plots.
• The UI now asks for confirmation before closing and shows shutdown progress.
• UI now tries to shut down servers gracefully before exiting, and also closes
  the daemon before starting.
• The various sub repositories (chiapos, chiavdf, etc.) now build ARM64 binary
  wheels for Linux with Python 3.8. This makes installing on Ubuntu 20.04 lts on
  a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 easy.
• Ci's check to see if they have secret access and attempt to fail cleanly so
  that ci runs successfully complete from PRs or forked repositories.
• Farmer now sends challenges after a handshake with harvester.
• The bls-signatures binary wheels include libsodium on all but Windows which
  we expect to add in future releases.
• The chia executable is now available if installing from the Windows or MacOS
  Graphical installer. Try ./chia -h from
  ~\AppData\Local\Chia-Blockchain\app-0.1.8\resources\app.asar.unpacked\daemon\
  in Windows or
  /Applications/Chia.app/Contents/Resources/app.asar.unpacked/daemon on MacOS.

Changed

• Minor changes have been made across the repositories to better support
  compiling on OpenBSD. HT @n1000.

• Changed XCH units to TXCH units for testnet.

• A push to a branch will cancel all ci runs still running for that branch.

• Ci's now cache pip and npm caches between runs.

• Improve test speed with smaller discriminants, less blocks, less keys, and
  smaller plots.

• RPC servers and clients were refactored.

• The keychain no longer supports old keys that don't have mnemonics.

• The keychain uses BIP39 for seed derivation, using the "" passphrase, and
  also stores public keys.

• Plots.yaml has been replaced. Plot secret keys are stored in the plots,
  and a list of directories that harvester can find plots in are in config.yaml.
  You can move plots around to any directory in config.yaml as long as the farmer
  has the correct farmer's secret key too.

• Auto scanning of plot directories for .plot files.

• The block header format was changed (puzzle hashes and pool signature).

• Coinbase and fees coin are now in merkle set, and bip158 filter.

• New harvester protocol with 2/2 harvester and farmer signatures, and modified
  farmer and full node protocols.

• 255/256 filter which allows virtually unlimited plots per harvester or drive.

• Improved create_plots and check_plots scripts, which are now
  "chia plots create" and "chia plots check".

• Add plot directories to config.yaml from the cli with "chia plots add".

• Use real plot sizes in UI instead of a formula/

• HD keys now use EIP 2333 format instead of BIP32, for compatibility with
  other chains.

• Keys are now derived with the EIP 2334 (m/12381/8444/a/b).

• Removed the ability to pass in sk_seed to plotting, to increase security.

• Linux builds of chiavdf and blspy now use a fresh build of gmp 6.2.1.

Fixed

• uPnP now works on Windows.
• Log rotation should now properly rotate every 20MB and keep 7 historical logs.
• Node had a significant memory leak under load due to an extraneous fork
  in the network code.
• Skylake processors on Windows without AVX would fail to run.
• Harvester no longer runs into 512 maximum file handles open issue on Windows.
• The version generator for new installers incorrectly handled the "dev"
  versions after a release tag.
• Due to a python bug, ssl connections could randomly fail. Worked around
  Python issue 29288
• Removed websocket max message limit, allowing for more plots
• Daemon was crashing when websocket gets improperly closed

Deprecated

• All keys generated before Beta 1.8 are of an old format and no longer useful.
• All plots generated before Beta 1.8 are no longer compatible with testnet and
  should be deleted.

Known Issues

• For Windows users on pre Haswell CPUs there is a known issue that causes
  "Given G1 element failed g1_is_valid check" when attempting to generate
  keys. This is a regression from our previous fix when it was upstreamed into
  relic. It can be fixed with this patch: https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/Windows-pre-Haswell-1.8-workaround

1.0beta7

[1.0beta7]

2020-06-08

Added

• Added ability to add plot from filesystem (you will need pool_pk and sk from plots.yaml.)
• Added ability to import private keys in the UI.
• Added ability to see private keys and mnemonic seeds in the keys menu
• User can specify log level in the config file (defaults to info.)
• 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.

Changed

• Plots are now refreshed in the UI after each plot instead of at the end of plotting.
• We have made performance improvements to plotting speed on all platforms.
• The command line plotter now supports specifying it's memory buffer size.
• 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.
• The install.sh script now discovers if it's running on Ubuntu less than 20.04 and correctly upgrades node.js to the current stable version.
• 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.

Fixed

• Having spaces in the path to a plot or temporary directory caused plotting to fail.
• Changing keys will no longer interrupt plotting log.
• 1.6 introduced a bug where certain very many core machines would sync the blockchain very slowly.
• The plotter log in the UI should scroll more reliably.
• The plotter UI should display the correct log on all platforms
• Starting chia now waits for the full node to be active before contacting the introducer.

Known issues

• Migration of plots from 1.6 to 1.7 is not working, A workaround is to rename ~/.chia/beta1.0b6 to ~/.chia/beta1.0b5 before running the new application, or just copy over the plots.yaml from the ~/.chia/beta1.0b6/config/plots.yaml to ~/.chia/beta1.0b7/config/plots.yaml
• Log rotation is not working properly

1.0beta6

Beta 1.6

2020-06-01

Added

• 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.
• Create plots and see the plotting log from a GUI on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
• You can now create or import private keys with a 24 word mnemonic, both in the UI and 'chia keys' command line.
• You can delete and change active keys from the GUI and cli.
• 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.
• Logs now autorotate. Once the debug.log reaches 20MB it is compressed and archived keeping 7 historical 20MB logs.
• We now have a CHANGELOG.md that adheres closely to the Keep a Changelog 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 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.

Changed

• Due to an issue with aggsig and aggsig-me, the beta 1.6 blockchain is not compatible with earlier chains.
• 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
  syntax has changed slightly. By default it calculates the last 24 blocks from the
  current LCA. Optionally you can use the -b flag to start the calculation from a different block
  height. Use -d to specify the delta number of blocks back into history to estimate over from either LCA or your -b block height.
• 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}.
• chiapos is now easier to compile with MSVC.
• 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.
• Moved to PyYAML 5.3.1 which prevents arbitrary code execution during python/object/new constructor.
• Moved to Python cryptography 2.9.2 which deprecates OpenSSL 1.0.1 and now relies upon OpenSSL 1.1.1g.
• Moved to aiosqlite 0.13.0 which adds official support for Python 3.8 and fixes a possible hung thread if a connection failed.

Fixed

• 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.
• Starting and stopping servers now works much more reliably.
• chia-check-plots uses the plot root and checks the plots in the same manner as harvester.
• chia-check-plots now does not override plots.yaml, which means concurrent plots will properly be added to plots.yaml.
• Fixed and issue where 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.
• Blocks with compact proofs of time are now able to be updated into the node database.
• 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.
• An issue in asyncio was not being caught correctly and that could cause nodes to crash.
• The build status shield layout is fixed in README.md
• Raspberry Pi 3/4 with Ubuntu 20.04LTS 64 bit should compile again.

Known issues

• Plotting does not work on directories with spaces
• Log rotation is not working properly
• On Mac, when migrating from older versions, on the first launch of 1.6, several keys have to be migrated, and each key requires password entry for each process, up to possibly 9 times. Please keep entering your password and click "Always Allow".
• 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.

1.0beta5

Beta 1.5

1. This release is primarily a maintenance release for Beta 1.4. There was a regression in Chia Proof of Space (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.

2. 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.

3. Coloured coins now have a prefix to help identify them. When sending transactions, the new prefix is incompatible with older clients. Additionally, the user interface now refers to chia coins with their correct currency code of XCH.

4. 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."

5. 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.

6. There was a bug in Timelord handling that could stop all VDF progress.

7. 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.

Known issues

1. 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.

2. Currently, there is no way to restore a Coloured Coin Wallet.

1.0beta4

Beta 1.4

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. The graphical Full Node display now shows the expected finish times of each of the prospective chain tips.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. Our Windows binaries check the processor they are about to run on at runtime and choose the best processor optimizations for our MPIR VDF dependency on Windows.

11. Most of the content of README.md and INSTALL.md have been moved to the repository wiki and placed in INSTALL and Quick Start Guide

12. Harvester is now asynchronous and will better be able to look up more plots spread across more physical drives.

13. Full node startup time has been sped up significantly by optimizing the loading of the blockchain from disk.

We suggest you take a look at our Upgrading documentation if you aren't performing a new install.

Known issues

1. Plots of k>=32 are not working for farming, and some broken plots can cause a memory leak. A workaround is available.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Currently, there is no way to restore a Coloured Coin Wallet.

6. 'chia stop all' command sometimes fails, use 'chia-stop-all' instead. In windows, use the task manager to stop the servers.

1.0beta3

1.0 Beta 3

1. Windows, WSL 2, Linux and MacOS installation is significantly streamlined. There is a new Windows installer for the Wallet GUI (huge thanks to @dkackman). In addition 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.

2. There is a new migration tool to move from Beta1 (or 2) to Beta3. It should move everything except your plots. There is also 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. If you've set $CHIA_ROOT you will have to make sure your existing configuration remains compatible manually.

3. 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. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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 also removed some race conditions in the Wallet, resolved the "invalid blocks could disconnect farmers" bug, and upped the default tls certificate size to 2048 for some unhappy operating systems.

6. We've made lots of little improvements that should speed up node syncing, added full block lookup to chia show, have farmers reconnect to their trusted node if they lose contact, and made the Wallet configurable to connect to a remote trusted node.

Known issues

1. Windows native is close but not here yet. Also, we should be adding back MacOS Mojave support shortly.

2. 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...

3. 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

1.0beta1

Beta 1.0

1. 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 will be available in the UIs shortly.

2. 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. Install is significantly easier with less dependencies on all supported platforms.

3. 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 has been updated to reflect the new commands. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. The libraries chia-pos, chia-fast-vdf, and chia-bip-158 have been moved to their own repositories: chiapos, chiavdf, chaibip158. They are brought in by chia-blockchain at install time. Our BLS signature library remains at bls-signatures.

9. We have continued to make improvements to the speed of VDF squaring, creating a VDF proof, and verifying a VDF proof.

Known issues

1. 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.

2. 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...

Upgrading

1. If you’re upgrading from Alpha and want to keep your plots, see Upgrading from Alpha to Beta in the repo wiki.

Alpha 1.5.1

Fixed a bug in harvester that caused plots not to be farmed.

Alpha 1.5

Alpha 1.5

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Harvesters now log errors if they encounter a malformed or corrupted plot file. Again thanks @xorinox.
4. New AJAX based full node UI. To access go to http://127.0.0.1:8555/index.html with any modern web browser on the same machine as the full node.
5. VDF verification code is improved and is now more paranoid.
6. 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.
7. 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/.
8. Improvements to shutting down services in all of the scripts in scripts/. Another @xorinox HT.
9. Thanks @dkackman for clean ups to the proof of space code.
10. Thanks to @davision for some typo fixes.

Alpha 1.4.1

Fix stack overflow in verifier