Basòdino v2 Round-up and Winners
The second version of our Basòdino testnet ended last week, and it was a resounding success, if we do say so ourselves. Even though we mostly intended it as an extension to Basòdino v1 for our existing community, we still had a host of new signups, taking our total registered user base to a tantalizing 999 (so close!)
This post will look back at what happened over the two weeks, including the all-important winners list. We’ll also be providing a sneak peak of what’s next for HOPR testnets.
And the 276 Winners Are…
Basòdino v2 saw the introduction of Daily Tasks, a way to increase community involvement and make our testnets less passive. These went really well, with almost everyone being able to use their nodes to participate. For future testnets we’ll definitely use a bot to provide acknowledgements and automate point scoring, but we’re very pleased with how well our ad hoc system held up.
One of the first tasks was for the community to flex their governance muscles and vote on the distribution of the 200,000 HOPR prize fund. The vote showed a general appetite for a flatter prize structure, with more winners and less randomness, even if it meant smaller individual prizes.
Congratulations to our Top 10 winners, shown in the table below.
The full list of prizes, including the 25 random awards, can be found here. There was a tie for 250th place, so there were actually 251 ranked winners, for a total prize pool of 200,500 HOPR.
How to Claim
If you won a prize in Basodino v1 and are happy to roll over your claim information, you don’t need to do anything, we’ll just add your reward to the existing one. If you didn’t win in Basodino v1, or you’re new to Basodino v2, you’ll need to send a claim to our support team.
First, send a direct message to twitter.com/hoprsupport which includes the Ethereum address you want your HOPR tokens sent to. For security reasons, please don’t tweet your claim publicly to this address. You must send a Twitter direct message from the same account that you used to register with our CoverBot and which is shown on the leaderboard at network.hoprnet.org.
If you’re unable to send this Tweet (we’re aware that Twitter has disabled some accounts), please contact our Ambassadors in Telegram for help.
Once the HOPR mainnet launches early next year, you’ll be able to claim your HOPR by submitting a transaction from your registered Ethereum address to our token distribution smart contract.
Details for how to get your wallet to recognize your HOPR tokens will be shared later. Do not claim your HOPR tokens using an exchange address, as you may not be able to access them.
Please use an Ethereum wallet such as MyCrypto, Metamask or MyEtherWallet and ensure you have a copy of the corresponding mnemonic stored in a secure offline location.
All claims must be made by 3pm CET on 8th December, 2020.
Now let’s look at what happened with some of the individual Daily Tasks.
HOPR Playlist
For the first weekend tasks, we asked people to submit links so we could build a HOPR playlist. Thanks for everyone’s submissions! The playlist can be found here.
Ask Me (Almost) Anything
The 12th Daily Task (Don’t Ask), invited people to submit questions about HOPR. We had hundreds of excellent submissions, far more interesting than when we’ve run AMAs in the past, so we’ll definitely run this type of task again.
The questions were so good that we’re going to dedicate a whole post to them, coming later this week.
For those interested, the forbidden question in the envelope that cost you points if you asked it was:
Luckily, no-one asked this specifically. Some people came very close, but we decided to be generous. For the record: we still have no information on this, please ask us about something interesting instead, like our protocol!
Push Your Luck
This was one of the less successful games. The first time we ran it everyone spaced themselves out evenly along the number line, so no-one won any bonus points. The second time there were too many options, with a lot of people picking unique numbers. Being bold really paid off here, with a top bonus of 498! We’ll have to rethink the rules, but we’re interested in running more simple games like this in future testnets, to investigate the psychology of large decentralized communities.
Find the Password Puzzle Answers
Throughout the testnet, participants were given a series of tasks to find passwords. These passwords could then be combined to form a final password on the final day.
Here’s the answers:
Find The Password I
This was pretty simple. Just follow the directions through the docs and answer the question about what packet format HOPR uses. The answer was SPHINX.
Find The Password II
This was a puzzle in the style of a Regency Era riddle. Taking the letters indicated in each line spelled MIXNET. (For the N, the page at the links had been rewritten as a lipogram with no Ns in.)
Find The Password III
This password was hidden in our update blog post. There were several ways to solve this one. Several words had pairs of unusually italicized letters. Taking these letters and all the letters in between (so, e.g., automatically would give MATIC) spelled the message:
Look close at the first in every para/graph. The solution is the sur/name of a metadata privacy king.
Looking at the first letters of each paragraph spelled the message:
ANSWER IS CHAUM
You could also find the answer by unjumbling the picture at the bottom, or looking at the screenshot of a HOPR chat message, where the answer was encrypted using ROT-13.
Given some of the questions we got on Day X, we should point out that David Chaum isn’t affiliated with HOPR, but HOPR does employ some of the principles outlined in his seminal paper on mixnets. (Also I really needed the letters in his name for the final password to work!)
Find the Password IV
For the fourth password, you had to solve a sudoku and decode the numbers on the long diagonal.
The completed sudoku looked like this:
Using the number key beneath the grid, the alphabet could be mapped to colours / numbers.
Applying this to the long diagonal spelled CHECKSUMS.
Find the Final Password
For the final password, participants had to use the previous four answers in a (very basic) approximation of how HOPR sends data privately.
The steps were:
- SPHINX MIXNET CHAUM CHECKSUMS
- SPHINX MIXNET CHAUM HEKUM
- SPHINX MIXNET CHAUME HEKUME
- ACEEEEHHHIIKMMMNNPSTUUXX
- ACEKPST
- PACKETS
Which of course is what HOPR sends data as.
I hope everyone enjoyed these puzzles. From the community response, it seems like there’s an appetite for making these even harder next time…
The Future of Testnets
Speaking of which, what lies ahead for HOPR testnets?
One thing we’ve learned is that our current format is too long. People are discouraged from joining if they feel too much time has passed, and our release schedule behind the scenes is so rapid that the community often ends up using an outdated version, which makes the data we gather less useful.
To remedy this, we plan to switch to a weekly cycle of shorter, more frequent testnets, starting later this month. These testnets will run for a few days, then we’ll gather feedback and update for a new release the following week. We hope this new system will allow us to maximize the help the community can give us as we push towards mainnet.
Our first new release is a big one, with a complete overhaul of how most of you interact with your node. Instead of using HOPR Chat, you’ll be directly using our hoprd app, with an interface identical to the one used by our AVADO node runners.
We’ll be releasing more details of this over the coming week.
We hope you enjoyed Basòdino v2. We certainly enjoyed running it!
Jose Aguinaga
HOPR Head of Engineering
