Idena Chronicles

Epochs 93–94

Idena
Idena
Published in
10 min readNov 4, 2022

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Network metrics

Active miners — total number of actively mining identities running their own mining nodes or delegated into mining pools.

Mining nodes — total number of full mining nodes run by individual identities or pool owners who activated online status.

Newcomers — number of addresses that validated for the first time

Success ratio — share of users attended the validation and successfully validated

Active wallets — unique wallets that made transactions during the last epoch

Competitors

Network stats

Markets

Node type stats for the last validation

Nodes on VPS — users running their nodes on VPS

Built-in nodes — users of the Idena Desktop App with build-in node

Shared nodes (web) — Web App users renting shared nodes via marketplace

N/A — users running outdated versions of nodes (VPS/built-in nodes)

Unknown shared nodes (web ) — Web App users who connect to shared nodes that are not listed in the Idena shared nodes marketplace

The data is given for the latest validation.

To have a smooth and reliable validation ceremony experience, we recommend using VPS or built-in nodes if you have fast Internet connection and good router, or the nodes listed in the node marketplace in the official Idena Web App in other cases.

Idena Core Team Update

Summary:

  1. Global validation failure (epoch 94)
  2. Visiting DevCon in Bogota
  3. A new desktop app release
  4. UI improvements on validation
  5. Choosing the best flip on validation
  6. IIP-5 progress
  7. IIP-6 Quadratic invitation rewards

Global validation failure (epoch 94)

There was a global validation failure on October 18. All nodes failed to start the validation due to the unforeseen issue. It was a mix of two rare events. First, there was an identity that remained Candidate after the previous validation. The flips that this identity solved on the short session were all disqualified after the long session. In this case, the protocol left the identity’s status the same as before the validation. After each validation there was a rebalancing of shards for validated identities and identities with Suspended and Zombie statuses, but not for identities with Candidate status. Secondly, as the network size has decreased, the number of shards went down from 4 to 2 and this identity’s shard number was 4. Thus, it was assigned to the non-existent shard.

Shortly after the incident, we released the hard fork that shifted the validation to October 22 and fixed the issue for identities with Candidate status. Now if a Candidate has only non-qualified flips on the short session, the identity becomes Newbie.

The similar fix for identities with Suspended and Zombie statuses will be released in one of the upcoming hard forks.

Visiting Devcon in Bogota

If you follow us on Twitter, you already know that we went to the Devcon in Bogota, one of the major crypto events. It was a long way to fly but it was worth it.

There are two take-aways that reveal the problems of the current PoS systems:

  • The lack of effective measures preventing the concentration of ETH supply which is critical for the PoS-network security:
  • More than half of Ethereum blocks are OFAC-compliant, which means that the fact of possible censorship of transactions on Ethereum is becoming a reality:

Devcon is the perfect place for networking. We talked in person with the blockchain leading experts and experts in the decentralized identity and sybil-resistance fields and agreed to collaborate. The concept of Quadratic staking coupled with Sybil-resistant identity attracts a lot of attention as a promising solution to the concentration of power problem in the PoS systems.

We are excited to share that the Idena team was invited to one of the podcasts that focuses on the Sybil-resistance problem. Stay tuned!

A new desktop app release

We have released a new desktop client version 0.34.1. The new version includes the following features:

  • Ads module
  • an Oracle update to display ad reviewing votings correctly
  • flip protection with adversarial noise starting from epoch 95

Please be aware that if you regularly turn off your node and use fast sync for the desktop app, the list of current ads may differ from the list when you log in to the Web app using one of the shared nodes. This is because fast sync does not index all the transactions. If your node is synced all the time, there won’t be any problem.

UI improvements on validation

During the qualification session there may be some cases when the keywords of the flip are not loaded. It happens when the author of the flip did not publish the keywords in time (maybe he/she missed the validation). We see that some users, especially newcomers, do not know what to do in such cases.

For the flips which keywords did not load immediately we have added a countdown timer (3 min 30 sec starting from 13:30 UTC). If the keywords are not loaded, there is a Skip button which a user can click and go to the next flip. If the flip with the non-loaded keywords doesn’t follow the rules (for example, it has enumerated objects or inappropriate content), it can be reported as usual.

Choosing the best flip on validation

Now users can choose one best flip during the qualification session. If the flip is marked by the majority of the committee, the author of the flip can receive up to 8x the reward. Please read more here.

We hope that financial motivation will lead to flip quality improvement by encouraging people to create out of the ordinary flips.

We will monitor how people use this feature for several validations and if there is no abuse, the number of slots for best flips could be increased (for example, up to 3).

IIP-5 progress

We keep monitoring the IIP-5 progress. Despite the reduction in the size of the network, the share of validators (mining nodes) continues to grow. We see this as a positive trend, coupled with the fact that most large pools are shrinking.

The charts below show how mining rewards were distributed before IIP-5 and the current distribution for the Epoch 93.

The share of large pools’ mining rewards has decreased significantly from 71% to 13%. Now solo miners and family pools that replenish their stakes extract most of the mining rewards. That was one of the aims of the IIP-5 — to redistribute the mining income from large pools to independent validators.

IIP-6 Quadratic invitation rewards

Before quadratic staking, pools were the main driver of network growth. Over the course of several epochs, we observe a decrease in the size of the pools. We believe this makes the network healthier, but network growth is necessary to achieve redundant decentralization to enable long-term sharding plans. To stimulate the organic growth of the network, we proposed to implement quadratic rewards for invites — see IIP-6 for details.

If you participated in the voting about IIP-6, please login to the Idena app and publish your vote

https://app.idena.io/oracles/view?id=0x6949ddc658c59a4b88358991a408ffaee6abd52f

Community

Global community channels

Top active users

Community Discord leaderboard:

Telegram — Global community leaderboard:

Telegram — Idena Balkan leaderboard:

Telegram — Idena Italia leaderboard:

Telegram — Idena France leaderboard:

Telegram — Idena Vietnam leaderboard:

If you want to feature your telegram community leaderboard in the Idena Chronicles, please add ComBot to your telegram group and add @AndrewIdena to the list of group admins to give the Idena core team access to your group stats.

Idena website translations

Idena website translations
Idena website translations by languages
Idena Web app translations
Idena Web app translations by languages

We invite you to join the idena translation community and contribute to the translation of the Idena website to your language!

If you want to take part in translation verification and funding, please contact Syd or Rioda to join the translation management workgroup.

Community updates

Edited by Syd

Hey Idenians! We just got another busy epoch where the community never stopped discussing, proposing, and building. In the same time, and step by step, the community governance is also maturing and starting to thrive.

Idena Node installation process on a Android Mobile Device, a complete guide by Fireshift

Have you thought of using an old Android Mobile phone as an Idena mining device? Thanks to Fireshift/Ltraveler amazing work, you can now use a complete script and follow a manual guide in order to implement Idena into an Android mobile platform.

You can check it out here: https://medium.com/@idna.project/b9229c010440

The repository can be found there: https://github.com/ltraveler/idena-armer

With low system requirements, this possibility allows an even more democratic mining and makes Idena easier to solo mine. Finally, it can be also used to create flips and pass validation without the necessity to buy an API key and pay fees to pools.

Please note that a funding proposal regarding this community initiative has been proposed (see below in the Community Proposals section).

IIP: Flip Reviews proposal by SimonSaysHello#9406

After the community suggestion by JustinMiles on How to improve flips quality (see https://github.com/idena-network/idena-docs/discussions/96 and previous Chronicles), community member Simon made also a detailed proposal introducing “Flips Reviews”, which is an overhaul of the flip report system that includes both the reporting and the scoring of flips based on AI resistance and keyword usage during the long session.

Please have a look at this impressive proposal and feel free to give your feedback and participate in the discussion: https://github.com/idena-network/idena-docs/discussions/103

Idena Coacher, an Idena Node Monitor Tool by Fireshift

Fireshift (who is definitely on fire!) also released Idena Coacher, an Idena Node monitor tool which allows you to manage your Idena remote node via SSH. You can activate your mining status and change your private key without using a desktop client to connect to your node.

Check it out: https://github.com/ltraveler/idena-coacher

Notable tweets

· Idena, the only project to really fight for Sybil resistance

· Another round of Flip wars which saw Zen claiming the victory!

Community Wallet and Community Proposals

Address: https://idenawallet.community/wallets

On-going proposals: https://idenawallet.community/proposals

ICYMI, the Community Wallet is now controlled by 5 delegates who execute decisions made on Oracles through multi-sig. For more details, please refer to the Chronicles #89.

NEW Community Proposals

Two proposals were discussed and voted recently (more details in the oracles and attached blogposts). We had many community discussions regarding these proposals, thanks also to community delegates implication who challenged them. Ultimately, the community, through oracles approved these proposals. Another amazing show of a transparent governance, leveraged by Idena PoP. Congratulations to the authors of the proposals!

· Flip wars funding by EDM: https://scan.idena.io/contract/0xc48cc13299e233ae2b618b899bffe2b593e8440d

· Idena-go implementation for ARM64 by Fireshift mentioned above: https://scan.idena.io/contract/0x3872105d195c8a3a6f0290f883e0b10c3f4a2167

REMINDER regarding Community Proposals:

As the Community is now empowered to build and get funded/rewarded through a democratic governance leveraged by Idena Oracles, please remember that everyone can make a funding proposal.

For that purpose, please join the Community Discord https://discord.gg/UrsDEHMs, reach #community-proposals-and-discussion and follow instructions in the pinned message.

Join the Idena community:

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Idena
Idena
Editor for

Proof-of-Person blockchain. Idena is a novel way to formalize people on the web: https://idena.io