Chik-blockchain

Added

- F1 generation in the plotter is now fully parallel for a small speedup.
- We have bitfield optimized phase 2 of plotting. There is only about a 1% increase in speed from this change but there is a 12% decrease in writes with a penalty of 3% more reads. More details in [PR 120](https://github.com/Chik-Network/chikpos/pull/120). Note that some sorts in phase 2 and phase 3 will now appear "out of order" and that is now expected behavior.
- Partial support for Python 3.9. That includes new versions of Chik dependencies like chikbip158.

Changed

- We have moved from using gulrak/filesystem across all platforms to only using it on MacOS. It's required on MacOS as we are still targeting Mojave compatibility. This should resolve Windows path issues.
- We upgraded to cbor 5.2.0 but expect to deprecate cbor in a future release.

Fixed

- A segfault caused by memory leaks in bls-library has been fixed. This should end the random farmer and harvester crashes over time as outlined in [Issue 500](https://github.com/Chik-Network/chik-blockchain/issues/500).
- Plotting could hang up retrying in an "error 0" state due to a bug in table handling in some edge cases.
- CPU utilization as reported in the plotter is now accurate for Windows.
- FreeBSD and OpenBSD should be able to build and install chik-blockchain and its dependencies again.
- Starting with recent setuptools fixes, we can no longer pass an empty string to the linker on Windows when building binary wheels in the sub repos. Thanks jaraco for tracking this down.

Changed

- Bumped aiohttp to 3.6.3

Fixed

- In the GUI there was [a regression](https://github.com/Chik-Network/chik-blockchain/issues/484) that removed the scroll bar on the Plot page. The scroll bar has returned!
- In Dark Mode you couldn't read the white on white plotting log text.
- To fix a bug in Beta 15's plotter we introduced a fixed that slowed plotting by as much as 25%.
- Certain NTFS root mount points couldn't be used for plotting or farming.
- Logging had [a regression](https://github.com/Chik-Network/chik-blockchain/issues/485) where log level could no longer be set by service.

Added

- The Chik GUI now supports dark and light mode.
- The GUI now supports translations and localizations. If you'd like to add your language you can see the examples in [the locales directory](https://github.com/Chik-Network/chik-blockchain/tree/dev/electron-react/src/locales) of the chik-blockchain repository.
- `chik check plots` now takes a `-g` option that allows you to specify a matching path string to only check a single plot file, a wild card list of plot files, or all plots in a single directory instead of the default behavior of checking every directory listed in your config.yaml. A big thank you to eFishCent for this pull request!
- Better documentation of the various timelord options in the default config.yaml.

Changed

- The entire GUI has been refactored for code quality and performance.
- Updated to chikpos 0.12.32. This update significantly speeds up the F1/first table plot generation. It also now can log disk usage while plotting and generate graphs. More details in the [chikpos release notes](https://github.com/Chik-Network/chikpos/releases/tag/0.12.32).
- Node losing or not connecting to another peer node (which is entirely normal behaviour) is now logged at INFO and not WARNING. Your logs will be quieter.
- Both the GUI and CLI now default to putting the second temporary directory files into the specified temporary directory.
- SSL Certificate handling was refactored along with Consensus constants, service launching, and internal configuration management.
- Updated to klvm 0.5.3. This fixed a bug in the `point_add` operator, that was causing taproot issues. This also removed the `SExp.is_legit_list` function. There were significant refactoring of various smart transactions for simplicity and efficiency.
- WalletTool was generally removed.
- Deprecated pep517.build for the new standard `python -m build --sdist --outdir dist .`

Fixed

- A bug in bls-singatures/blspy could cause a stack overflow if too many signatures were verified at once. This caused the block of death at 11997 of the Beta 15 chain. Updated to 0.2.4 to address the issue.
- GUI Wallet now correctly updates around reorgs.
- chikpos 0.12.32 fixed a an out of bounds read that could crash the plotter. It also contains a fix to better handle the case of drive letters on Windows.
- Node would fail to start on Windows Server 2016 with lots of cores. This [python issue explains]( https://bugs.python.org/issue26903) the problem.

Known Issues

- On NTFS, plotting and farming can't use a path that includes a non root mountpoint. This is fixed in an upcoming version but did not have enough testing time for this release.

Added

- Choosing a larger k size in the GUI also increases the default memory buffer.

Changed

- The development tool WalletTool was refactored out.
- Update to klvm 0.5.3.
- As k=30 and k=31 are now ruled out for mainnet, the GUI defaults to a plot size of k=32.

Fixed

- Over time the new peer gossip protocol could slowly disconnect all peers and take your node offline.
- Sometimes on restart the peer connections database could cause fullnode to crash.

Added

- Node peers are now gossiped between nodes with logic to keep connected nodes on disparate internet networks to partially protect from eclipse attacks. This is the second to last step to remove our temporary introducer and migrate to DNS introducers with peer gossip modeled directly off of Bitcoin. This adds a new database of valid peer nodes that will persist across node restarts. This also makes changes to config.yaml's contents.
- For 'git clone' installs there is now a separate install-gui.sh which speeds up running install.sh for those who wish to run headless and makes docker and other automation simpler.
- The rate limited wallet library now supports coin aggregation for adding additional funds after the time of creation.
- Fees are now used in all applicable rate limited wallet calls
- New parameters for plotting: -r (number of threads) -s (stripe size) -u (number of buckets) in cli and GUI
- chikvdf now has full IFMA optimizations for processors that support it.

Changed

- Multithreading support in chikpos, as well as a new algorithm which is faster and does 70% less IO. This is a significant improvement in speed, much lower total writing, and configurability for different hardware environments.
- Default -b changed to 3072 to improve performance
- The correct amount of memory is used for plotting
- `sh install.sh` was upgraded so that on Ubuntu it will install any needed OS dependencies.
- Wallet and puzzlehash generation have been refactored and simplified.
- Wallet has had various sync speed ups added.
- The rpc interfaces of all chik services have been refactored, simplified, and had various additional functionality added.
- Block timestamps are now stored in the wallet database. Both database versions were incremented and databases from previous versions will not work with Beta 14. However, upon re-sync all test chik since Beta 12 should appear in your wallet.
- All vestigial references to plots.yaml have been removed.

Fixed

- Temporary space required for each k size was updated with more accurate estimates.
- Tables in the README.MD were not rendering correctly on Pypi. Thanks again altendky.
- Chikpos issue where memory was spiking and increasing
- Fixed working space estimates so they are exact
- Log all errors in chikpos
- Fixed a bug that was causing Bluebox vdfs to fail.

Added

Changed

- Long_description_content_type is now set to improve chik-blockchikn's Pypi entry. Thanks to altendky for this pull request.
- A minor edit was made to clarify that excessive was only related to trolling in the Code of Conduct document.

Fixed

- When starting the GUI from an installer or the command line on Linux, if you had not previously generated a key on your machine, the generate new key GUI would not launch and you would be stuck with a spinner.
- Farmer display now correctly displays balance.