Update Friday December 21st, 2018
Santa’s on his way, so we’ll all be getting together with our families to roast chestnuts on our new 9-GPU rigs, the kids unable to sleep with excitement for Grin’s mainnet.
I expect I probably won’t be getting around to an update next week (or have enough to report to make one worthwhile,) so I’ll leave the next update until consumer-stimulus season is over and the Year of the Grin rolls around. I might even spend a bit of time with the Yeastlings as well, mostly just to make sure they don’t wreck anything else.
The past week has been about Floonet, which (a couple of hiccups aside), launched happily enough. For my own part, it was mostly bug fixes and knocking one or two things off the ‘must-have for mainnet’ list.
But I think I want to write about something slightly different today. After the launch of Floonet, I’m in as close to a sentimental mood as I ever get, meaning the empty space in my rib cage where my heart should be is a degree less cold than it should be.
So I’ve taken off the developer Santa hat for a few moments, cause when that’s on all I can do is focus on the massive list of things that either could be better or still need to be done. Instead, I’m just sitting back a bit and playing with all of the things we’ve all built over the past couple of years.
I recently set up a new rig (this one’s the Yeast Tsunami,) which I’ll be using to add my own paltry hashpower to the fray on mainnet, and today I went to install from scratch. I pulled and installed Grin (while carefully following the build guide, of course,) and it worked. I type grin
at the command prompt, and up comes a fairly-informative TUI telling you what’s going on with your node and the chain. Sync kicks in (not enough blocks yet for fast sync), and I’m up to date and synced and in consensus with 18 other nodes. Stats on all of my peers and what’s going on mining-wise is all available right there if I need it. Although it’s early days for floonet, nobody’s reporting being out of sync, and the difficulty adjustment that has to account for AR and AT POWs appears to be behaving well
In another tmux pane, I type grin wallet init -h
to create a new wallet. It gives me a BIP-39 recovery phrase which it tells me to write down (which of course I do, diligently,). I create a new account for mining, and start the wallet listening on that account.
So, let’s try mining. I take down the server, then turn on the stratum server in grin-server.toml and restart the server, which is configured by default to mine into the listening wallet on the default port. Because of the embedded stratum-server approach in Grin, now I can mine into my node and listening wallet from however many rigs I care to set up.
So then grin-miner… I check it out, change a config file to have it build the CUDA libs, and build. Grin-miner builds with all available plugins, and I have a range of CPU and GPU options to mine with right out of the box. I configure it to concurrently run cuckaroo29 on 2 2080s currently in the rig, and start grin-miner. Both cards hum into action and start mining away into my listening stratum server, confirmed by another TUI with useful stats about each mining device. Back on the server side, the ‘mining’ tab shows me the connected worker, and gives me more useful stats about how many shares each connected worker is contributing, and how many blocks have been found.
I find a few blocks and funds go into the wallet, which I can check with grin wallet info
. Once they’ve matured, I should be able to exchange them with other users via files, http, or even directly via keybase.
Of course, Grin is larger than its github projects. Invariably, I’d want to check the status of the chain on a block explorer… I can go to Grinscan or Grinmint’s explorer.
Speaking of Grinmint, I decided to point a yeastmonster at Grinmint for a bit, everything works, and it looks excellent… very well designed and as easy to use as it possibly can be. I also try Grinpool, which gives me a similarly successful mining experience.
And that’s just a small sampling of community projects. On the wallet side we have a few upcoming projects,such as Grinbox, as well as quite a few mobile wallets being built. Open CL miners are being worked on (which I hope will be integrated into Grin-miner) and I’m sure there are many other bits of infrastructure that have yet to be announced. If I’ve missed anyone I apologies, but think it’s safe to say that a completely open-source coin with this kind of quality community infrastructure in place is a rarity to behold.
Now, of course there are still things to do, the code isn’t perfect, and your particular machine might not be able to compile the Cuda plugins without some painful support issues. But we’ve come a long way since Voldy did his bitcoin-wizards drive-by thing and Igno decided to push a bit rust code to github (WTF is this rust thing?).
When I look at these things in front of me, I feel proud. And I mean for real, not like you’re at some corporate launch party with a few project managers pretending to give a shit. Everyone involved in Grin’s development should spend a few minutes sitting there bonding with this daftly-named Floonet, and feel some genuine pride, because there’s genuinely something here to be proud of. And that’s not something you get to feel much of in this life.
So, many congratulations to the entire Grin community. Take some time this holiday season to relish this moment, cause silly season is coming on Jan 15th, The Year of the Grin.
A very Yeasty holiday season from me and all Yeast-beings in this house. And don’t let Granny drink too much.