Jarrett Hard Fork Announcement

Dear Idena community,

It has been one year since the launch of identity staking. Fortunately, identity staking has not turned into a plutocracy thanks to the principle of one-person-one-vote (where larger stake does not grant more voting power) and the sublinear reward distribution formula (reward share = stake⁰·⁹). We observe pools stepping back, making room for individual miners and family pools. This proves the correctness of the chosen economic model. However, the one-person-one-vote protocol remains vulnerable to attacks by human farms, despite the economic infeasibility of such attacks. This hard fork aims to increase the cost of such attacks.

Despite the retreat of human farms, the number of individual miners is decreasing. This is due to various factors, including the features of the protocol itself and an initial focus on geographic regions with the largest user base, primarily located in Asia, at the expense of the Western hemisphere. This hard fork is aimed at encouraging the growth of the number of individual miners who support identity staking.

We plan to release a new version of the Idena node on July 6th 2023. This will be a node version update released with the number 1.1.0. In keeping with the tradition set by the previous hard fork, we have selected the name ‘Jarrett Hard Fork’ in honor of Keith Jarrett, a legendary jazz musician and a personal favorite of Andrew’s co-founder of Idena.

This will be a hard fork that includes the following changes.

1. Protocol security improvements

IIP-11

Increase the cost of 51% attack by disregarding votes from identities with stake amounts below a certain threshold. This threshold is set as a percentage of the median stake of top 100 accounts.

Motivation

Until now, the cost of 51% attack includes only the costs for validation (paying people to validate accounts that belong to an attacker) as well as the costs of operating separate mining nodes. With this change, the cost of an attack will increase because it will be necessary to replenish the stakes of validated accounts.

More details here: https://docs.idena.io/docs/iip/iip-11

IIP-12

Lock invitee rewards for 10 subsequent epochs to prevent repeatedly validating and terminating accounts invited by identities with high stakes.

Motivation

• Mitigating the abuse of invitee rewards
• New users will get more chances to receive invitations from identities with high stakes

Read more details here: https://docs.idena.io/docs/iip/iip-12

2. Improvements for the network growth

Previously we have withdrawn IIP-2, despite receiving support from the majority of the network, because the proposal did not achieve a dominant majority. However, due to the decrease in the number of users in Asia (mostly from human farms), we renew the status of IIP-2 and ask you to support it by voting for the upcoming hard fork.

IIP-2

Change the time of validation ceremony from 13:30 UTC to 15:00 UTC.

Motivation

Make the time of validation ceremony more convenient for people that live in the Western Hemisphere.

Read more details here: https://docs.idena.io/docs/iip/iip-2

IIP-9

Change the minimum epoch length to 14 days for the network that exceeds 291 identities.

Motivation:

Reducing the time users need to spend on making flips and doing validations when the network is not big enough

Read more details here: https://docs.idena.io/docs/iip/iip-9

IIP-10

Add stake protection for identities with Zombie status in case of missing validation in the same manner as in case of failing validation.

Motivation

• The proposed change will motivate people to maintain their identities even with Zombie status.
• Reducing the risk of older identities losing their stake due to some technical/personal issues (for example, electricity outage or medical appointment)

More details here: https://docs.idena.io/docs/iip/iip-10

Short session validation criteria

Change success/failure criteria for the short session in corner cases as follows:

• If there is only 1 qualified flip on the short session, the short session will be considered as successful even if the answer is incorrect.
• If there are only 2 qualified flips on the short session the validation will be failed only if both answers are incorrect and these flips have strong consensus. However, if any of these flips has a weak consensus, it will be treated as passing the short session even though both answers are wrong.

Validation can still be failed in these cases due to the total score falling below 75% even though the short session is treated as successful.

Motivation

There have been some cases when people get only 1 or 2 qualified flips during the short session on validation. If a person answered incorrectly on 1 flip, the validation was considered as failed. Now such cases are handled in favor of the user since the small number of flips are insufficient to justify the user’s personhood.

3. Bug fixes

Duplicating events bug fix

Fixing the bug when a contract emits duplicate events when methods are called.

How the hard fork will be activated

1. The new node version will support both the current blockchain protocol and the upcoming protocol changes.
2. By running the new version of the node you vote for the upcoming protocol changes. By running the previous version of the node you vote against the protocol changes. To publish your vote you need to keep your Idena node online with the activated mining status during the hard fork voting period.
3. The hard fork voting period will start on the next day of the Epoch #0114 at 8 am UTC. The hard fork will be activated immediately once the voting criteria is met. Otherwise, the hard fork update will be blocked on July 20th, 2023.
4. The hard fork update will be activated only when more than 80% of the non-discriminated validators who run their nodes support the upcoming changes.
5. Newbie and delegated address votes are discriminated against and not counted. Pool owners are counted once.