Added
- Windows and MacOS now have one click installers that then send users to a GUI on both platforms to farm or use their wallets. Windows is built on GitHub Actions and MacOS is also built on Azure Pipelines so as to build on Mojave.
- You can see and control your farmer, harvester, and plotter from the GUI on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
- Create plots and see the plotting log from a GUI on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
- You can now create or import private keys with a 24 word mnemonic, both in the UI and 'chik keys' command line.
- You can delete and change active keys from the GUI and cli.
- We added a new keychain system that replaces keys.yaml, and migrates existing users from keys.yaml. It utilizes each OS's keychain for slightly more secure key storage.
- We added a `chik keys` command line program, to see, add, and remove private keys.
- We added RPC servers and RPC client implementations for Farmer and Harvester. The new UI uses these for additional information and functionality.
- We added total network storage space estimation to the node RPC at the `/get_network_space` endpoint instead of only being available in the cli. The RPC endpoint takes two block header hashes and estimates space between those header hashes.
- Logs now autorotate. Once the debug.log reaches 20MB it is compressed and archived keeping 7 historical 20MB logs.
- We now have a CHANGELOG.md that adheres closely to the [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.0.0/) standard. We merged in the version history and updated some previous release notes to capture items important to the change log. We are modifying our release process to accumulate changes at the top of the change log and then copy those to the release notes at the time of the release.
- We added [lgtm](https://lgtm.com/) source analysis on pull request to the chik-blockchain, chikpos, chikvdf, chikbip158, and bls-library repositories to add some automated security analysis to our ci.
Changed
- Due to an issue with aggsig and aggsig-me, the beta 1.6 blockchain is not compatible with earlier chains.
- We replaced the Electron/JavaScript interface with a React user interface which is cleaner and more responsive.
- We now have a multithreaded harvester to farm more plots concurrently. This is especially faster when there are multiple disks being harvested. The class is also made thread safe with mutex guards. This is achieved by releasing GIL in the python bindings when fetching qualities and proofs. We estimate that the former guidance of only 50 plots per physical drive should be updated to 250-350 plots per physical drive. We will continue to improve the plots per physical drive limit during the beta period.
- Syncing a node is now much faster and uses less memory.
- `chik netspace` has been refactored to use the `/get_network_space` RPC. The command
syntax has changed slightly. By default it calculates the last 24 blocks from the
current LCA. Optionally you can use the `-b` flag to start the calculation from a different block
height. Use `-d` to specify the delta number of blocks back into history to estimate over from either LCA or your `-b` block height.
- The Full node RPC response formats have been changed. All API calls now return a dict with success, and an additional value, for example {"success": True, "block": block}.
- chikpos is now easier to compile with MSVC.
- create plots now takes in an optional sk_seed, it is no longer read in from keys.yaml. If not passed in, it is randomly generated. The -i argument can now only be used when you provide an sk_seed.
- Moved to PyYAML 5.3.1 which prevents arbitrary code execution during python/object/new constructor.
- Moved to Python cryptography 2.9.2 which deprecates OpenSSL 1.0.1 and now relies upon OpenSSL 1.1.1g.
- Moved to aiosqlite 0.13.0 which adds official support for Python 3.8 and fixes a possible hung thread if a connection failed.
Fixed
- In beta 1.5 we introduced a bug in aggsig and aggsig-me that we have fixed in this release. That forced a hard fork of the chain so coins and balances are lost from beta 1.5. There is no impact on existing plots.
- Starting and stopping servers now works much more reliably.
- `chik-check-plots` uses the plot root and checks the plots in the same manner as harvester.
- `chik-check-plots` now does not override plots.yaml, which means concurrent plots will properly be added to plots.yaml.
- Fixed and issue where [Relic](https://github.com/relic-toolkit/relic) and thus blspy would crash on processors older than Haswell as they don't support lzc.
- Some non-critical networking errors are no longer logged.
- Blocks with compact proofs of time are now able to be updated into the node database.
- The `install-timelord.sh` script now correctly determines which version of python it is running under and correctly builds vdf_client and correctly links to vdf_bench. It also handles upgrading CMake on Ubuntu's older than 20.04LTS do satisfy the new CMake 3.14+ requirement to build Timelord.
- An issue in asyncio was not being caught correctly and that could cause nodes to crash.
- The build status shield layout is fixed in README.md
- Raspberry Pi 3/4 with Ubuntu 20.04LTS 64 bit should compile again.