15 Nov Symbol blockchain news update – 15/11/21
Hi everyone, hope that you had a good weekend! I feel like I haven’t posted in forever so here’s a short catch up of what I failed to report on over the last couple of days! 😁
Harlock
Well the euphoria of Cyprus is just dying down but we still have another big week ahead with the NEM Harlock fork!
The NEM fork “Harlock” will be upon us in a few days (Thursday 18th PM UTC) and it looks like we are in great shape here now (thank you everyone that has upgraded their node already!). Looking forward to seeing this pass and then the past is behind us and NEM and Symbol can finally move forward.
Monitoring the fork
Looks like there is a new URL for the fork monitoring stats as of about 10 minutes ago so here’s yet another update to today’s post 😁 Keep an eye on this page as we go through the week – hopefully it will be plain sailing but never rule out last minute drama!
Afternoon update 😬
It seems just after I posted today’s update there was a bit of drama. According to this tweet “san”, “go” and “jusan” .nem.ninja nodes are now down and they are therefore no longer showing support for Harlock. This has changed the picture somewhat and highlights the fact that if you own a NEM node you should update to support the fork. If you are a NEM harvester then please delegate to a node that is supporting the Harlock fork!
NIS1 releases supporting Harlock
For those of you that were wondering, there is now a 0.6.99 version of NIS1 which contains a small fix. If you have upgraded to 0.6.98 then I guess it is not essential that you upgrade again at this point (you have already voted yes) and if you have upgraded to the latest version 0.6.99, then this is also a vote for the Harlock fork. If you are not running either then please upgrade!!
More fork information
If you are interested in learning more about the forks please check out this article. Also, @TrendStream recently wrote a brief commentary in the Japanese crypto media which is linked to in the tweet below (and was later picked up by Yahoo Japan!). Even if you don’t read Japanese (like me!) it reads well with automatic translation.
Greed and waste
I don’t know how much has been spent by the NEM Foundation and NGL over the past few years and I am not sure if this will ever be public knowledge but I would be really interested to know how much was spent and who the funds went to.
In the NEM of old funding decisions and financial reports were never exactly transparent. It was clear though that a lot of money was being spent and that maybe some of the spending was excessive and unwise. Didn’t NEM sponsor a Lithuanian basketball team at one point? Sure that there was some film or VR project that was on the go too but I can’t for the life of me remember the full details or find a link to it. Ah, found it: this one. Did we give any money to these guys? Would also be interesting to see the salaries given to (the seemly excessive number of) NEM staff at the time…
It looks like Hatchet is making the case for why we should not be throwing money around and I very much agree with this sentiment. Please read this thread for more information.
There was also an issue that PoI voting on community projects in the past was sometimes a popularity contest. This, at times, led to pretty poor proposals being excessively funded through this mechanism. The future for Symbol is that projects should fund themselves and profit from network fees and for those projects that can’t quadratic funding will step in and provide support.
HTTPS websockets
Here’s a reminder from cryptoBeliever to make sure that you have web sockets available if you are using HTTPS on your Symbol node. Please check out the thread for more information.
My advice is to just use Symbol Bootstrap to set everything up for you. You will just need to follow the instructions here and add the following lines to your custom presets before restarting symbol-bootstrap:
httpsProxies:
- excludeDockerService: falseAdditional note – it does require port 80 to be free which on my node it was not since I was running Apache. I had been meaning to enable HTTPS for a while but it literally only took a minute to do with symbol-bootstrap so if you haven’t got around to it yet now might be the time to do it.
Symbol getaways ☀️
Nice idea Leon! I’m always looking for an excuse to travel. If your place is nice and within my budget then I would definitely be interested in a stay! 😁 Keep up updated, maybe I will get to review it for the blog in the future!
Website art
It looks like @mahorobart has submitted some new art to be featured on the Symbol documentation website. Very nice! I hope to see the other boxes fill up soon. I know that there is a lot of talent out there so let’s contribute and make the new website look awesome with our community art!
Symbol and NEM merchandise
You can get your hands on some some amazing Symbol and NEM designed stuff from @TrendStream here.
Best of all you can get it shipped internationally!
I’m going to check this out tonight and place an order I think 😁
Thanks!
Thanks for reading – I will be back again soon with another Symbol Blog update! Also, if you are a regular reader then please consider harvesting on the Symbol Blog node xymharvesting.net – it would be hugely appreciated!
I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!
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