Beta 1.4

1. This release adds Coloured coin support with offers. Yes that is the correct spelling. Coloured coins allow you to issue a coin, token, or asset with nearly unlimited issuance plans and functionality. They support inner smart transactions so they can inherit any of the other functionality you can implement in Chialisp. Offers are especially cool as they create a truly decentralized exchange capability. Read much more about them in Bram's blog post on Coloured coins.

2. This release adds support for native Windows via a (mostly) automated installer and MacOS Mojave. Windows still requires some PowerShell command line use. You should expect ongoing improvements in ease of install and replication of the command line tools in the GUI. Again huge thanks to @dkackman for continued Windows installer development. Native Windows is currently slightly slower than the same version running in WSL 2 on the same machine for both block verification and plotting. We made some speed improvements that positively affected all platforms while trying to increase plotting speed in Windows.

3. This release breaks the wire protocol so it comes with a new chain. As we merged in Coloured coins we found that we needed to change how certain hashes were managed. Your 1.0beta3 coin balances will be lost when you upgrade but your plots will continue to work on the 1.0beta4 chain. Since we had to make a breaking wire protocol change we accelerated changing our hash to prime function for starting proofs of time. That was also going to be a future breaking change.

4. The graphical Full Node display now shows the expected finish times of each of the prospective chain tips.

5. Now you can run estimates of the total space currently farming the network. Try chia netspace -d 12 to run an estimate over the last 12 blocks which is approximately 1 hour.

6. Most scripts have been removed in favor of chia action commands. You can run chia version or chia start node for example. Just running chia will show you more options. However chia-create-plots continues to use the hyphenated form. Also it's now chia generate keys as another example.

7. Chia start commands like chia start farmer and chia stop node now keep track of process IDs in a run/ directory in your configuration directory. chia stop is unlikely to work on Windows native for now. If chia start -r node doesn't work you can force the run/ directory to be reset with chia start -f node.

8. We’ve added TLS authentication for incoming farmer connections. TLS certs and keys are generated during chia init and only full nodes with your keys will be able to connect to your Farmer. Also, Harvester, Timelord, and Wallet will now not accept incoming connections which reduces the application attack surface.

9. The node RPC has a new endpoint get_header_by_height which allows you to retrieve the block header from a block height. Try chia show -bh 1000 to see the block header hash of block 1000. You can then look up the block details with chia show -b f655e1a9f7f8c89a703e40d9ce82ae33508badaf7b37fa1a56cad27926b5e936 which will look up a block by it's header hash.

10. Our Windows binaries check the processor they are about to run on at runtime and choose the best processor optimizations for our MPIR VDF dependency on Windows.

11. Most of the content of README.md and INSTALL.md have been moved to the repository wiki and placed in INSTALL and Quick Start Guide

12. Harvester is now asynchronous and will better be able to look up more plots spread across more physical drives.

13. Full node startup time has been sped up significantly by optimizing the loading of the blockchain from disk.

We suggest you take a look at our Upgrading documentation if you aren't performing a new install.

Known issues

1. Plots of k>=32 are not working for farming, and some broken plots can cause a memory leak. A workaround is available.

2. If you are running a simulation, blockchain tips are not saved in the database and this is a regression. If you stop a node it can go back in time and cause an odd state. This doesn't practically effect testnet participation as, on restart, node will just sync up a few blocks to the then current tips.

3. uPnP support on Windows may be broken. However, Windows nodes will be able to connect to other nodes and, once connected, participate fully in the network.

4. Coins are not currently reserved as part of trade offers and thus could potentially be spent before the offer is accepted resulting in a failed offer transaction.

5. Currently, there is no way to restore a Coloured Coin Wallet.

6. 'chia stop all' command sometimes fails, use 'chia-stop-all' instead. In windows, use the task manager to stop the servers.