This release introduces a hard fork that activates at height 633720, approximately 2021-02-24 11:50 UTC. You will need to make sure you have upgraded your miner before this time in order to connect to the 2.4 network.
The release introduces SPoRA - the new consensus mechanism aiming to promote further replication of the dataset, and reduce the energy consumed by the network by trade hashing expenditure for throughput of data access links. See more about the design here.
The estimated USD to AR rate is fixed in the release version due to the high uncertainty about the difficulty change at the fork block. A follow-up hard fork will re-enable the dynamic difficulty-based price estimation. Thereby the /price endpoint would now return the precise amount to pay, not a pessimistic estimation of it.
It may take significantly longer than usual to mine the fork block, leading to disruption in usage of the network for this period.
HTTP API changes
- The "reward_pool", "block_size", and "weave_size" block fields are served as JSON strings starting from the fork block.
Transaction verification changes
- The "target" field must be empty when no tokens are transferred. For transfer transactions, the size of the "target" field must be 32 bytes.
- A bug is fixed where the nodes would not verify some valid RSA PSS signatures.
New features and improvements
- A new logging system is introduced. Logs are now written to "logs/arweave@127.0.0.1.*" and rotated automatically. The messages are one-liners.
- The "polling" command line option is an integer now - the polling frequency in seconds.
- The memory footprint is reduced.
The release also includes various performance improvements.
Bug fixes
- A bug was fixed where the miner won't log the "[Stage 3/3]" message about the confirmed mined blocks.
Upgrade instructions
N.2.4.0.0 comes with the prebuilt binaries for the Linux and Darwin x86_64 platforms.
Download the corresponding archive and unpack it:
tar -xzf arweave-2.4.0.0.linux-x86_64.tar.gz
It makes sense to unpack it inside a dedicated directory. You can always move this directory around, but the miner may not work if you move only some of the files. The weave data would, by default, be stored in this directory, too, but it can be overridden using the data_dir command-line argument.
The archive contents look like this:
bin/ data/ erts-10.3/ lib/ releases/
To run the miner, execute ./bin/start . See the mining guide for more details.
If your OS/platform architecture is not in the list, check README for how to build the miner from sources.
If you want to run the miner from the existing Git folder, execute the following command to upgrade:
git fetch --all --tags && git checkout -f N.2.4.0.0
You can now run the miner using the arweave-server script.
Support
For more details on how to run a mining node, please see our mining guide - https://docs.arweave.org/info/mining/mining-guide. If you have any issues upgrading or would like to know more about the release, feel free to reach out to us in the #mining channel on Discord Arweave Dev Talk server (https://discord.gg/DjAFMJc) or email us at team@arweave.org.