Tales of War — A Letter from the Front Line
My dearest,
I hope this finds you well. It’s been 43 days since the Battle of Nodes started and we’ve already had 28 days of intense combat. They told us the beginning would be for building only, but we got hit hard two times already. And the tough part is yet to come. Rumors have it that others got deployed to much calmer fronts, with less people manning fewer nodes, albeit in more difficult conditions.
There’s 310 of us out here, from 43 different countries, manning 853 nodes alongside Elrond’s 127. The guys are very friendly and we’re mostly having fun. Even if as we compete for the same $60.000 prize pool, we help each other out with advice, tutorials and tools. One guy even brought a robot that helps us do the heavy lifting.
You’ve probably heard some stories from the others, describing how they fared so far in battle.
We just moved from the Build Phase to the Challenge Phase. After they had us dig the trenches and switch to different shards, it’s time to prove just how much we can process. So far, we worked together as a team, and did over 1 billion transactions, sometimes even 30.000 per second, before the slowest of us fail and then we start again. Today we are at 1.000 TPS and holding, let’s see what they throw at us next.
As we get better at configuring the nodes and letting them do battle, there’s more time to read and do some work for missions. They made us send our favorite food as part of a transaction — I missed you so much when I told the boys about your Orange Ginger Honey-Cakes.
Then they had us send transactions, with all the money that we earned or from all the different shards. I now understand which address is from where and why is that important and order of times faster.
The next one was more simple, we just had to fill the data field with a certain number of characters, to see how gas and storage costs works. I wrote the names we discussed for our son a thousand times, and still can’t decide which fits him best. Have you thought about it?
The toughest mission so far challenged the trust we have in one another and had us doubt our comrades. They wanted to re-enact the Byzantine Generals problem and have us risk it all on trusting just a few of us. But we pulled through, thanks to our field medic and his heavy lifting robot.
I hear they want us to get rid of all our Windows nodes. Something about the fastest Virtual Machine to be invented yet using libraries not yet fit for the OS I use. My friends are teaching me all about running Virtual Machines on top of Windows so I can deploy my nodes on Linux without too much pain. I think I like this Linux stuff, it was a bit hard at first, but looking back, I wouldn’t dare running our nodes on Windows once Battle of Nodes is over and the Elrond mainnet comes.
We’re 6 weeks in and we have just 3 more to go — the ones where we do battle. I know there are among us those who will attack, while most will stand their ground. I will hold fast as well, of course, but there’s something up my sleeve I will not share with you just yet ;)
I will be home to you soon, with a prize and a plan to make the most of it when the time comes. If all goes well, I’ll know just what to do to run our nodes on mainnet and use the passive income to spend more time together. I send you my all, dearest. Here’s a picture of the nodes, in case you miss them:
PS: I know my dad will ask you for the figures, so here’s the list for him:
Battle of Nodes so far:
- 310 people from 43 different countries
- 980 total nodes: 805 community, 175 Elrond team & company
- 43 days in, 15 more to go
- $60.000 prize pool
- +1 billion transactions processed, 30k TPS max, stable at 2k TPS
- 55 issues opened in Github, 9 closed and 46 in progress
- 17 patches deployed over 43 days
- 5 challenging missions
- 394 people in the Validators Chat
For more information, please visit us:
