31 Dec Symbol blockchain news update – 31/12/21

Posted at 12:39h in Symbol Updates by
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I know I have been quiet for the last week or so but I’m back for a quick last post of 2021 and then will resume normal service from next Tuesday. Hope that you are enjoying your holidays and have something nice planned for this evening. I will be attempting to cook a six-course meal for four – we will see how it turns out 😬

Nodes, nodes and more nodes

I spotted three different node related posts from Jaguar so I will put them together under one headline. Firstly, if you are running a node then this is your first warning that you need to renew your node certificates annually. For those of you that started your node at Symbol launch, that means that you have around 3-months until your certificate expires. I really hope that we don’t see a repeat of what happened with the voting keys not being updated earlier in the year. Presumably, if you don’t update the certificates then your node will not be able to communicate with the rest of the network, you and your delegates won’t harvest and you won’t want this to happen.

Further details can be found in @wayon‘s advent calendar post:

Next, it seems that Syndicate employees will be encouraged to run their own NEM and Symbol nodes. I guess this is a nice idea in that it will give everyone hands-on experience of running their own node. I guess many of the Pirates will do this already but I assume this suggestion will apply to all employees from the most technical to the design team and beyond. I had never heard of “dogfooding” it sounds pretty gross but I like the concept 😁

From a node owners perspective, I can see that maybe this might raise a few eyebrows in terms of competition for harvesters from paid employees. Even if they are not taking a node fee it will still remove income from other community nodes. Just thinking out loud and this doesn’t bother me personally but not sure how the other 1,500 or so node owners will feel. Maybe the nodes will not be accepting delegates, who knows.

This kind of leads into the next post.

If you are running your own node currently and have feedback for the team then let them know and we may see some improvements in future releases. I really can’t fault symbol-bootstrap, I have always found it super simple to use and setting up a Symbol node was a breeze. I have no experience with running a NEM node so I can’t comment on this. What I would really love to see is nodes using the combined importance of their delegates to vote, I know that this has been discussed in the past but it would be good to see it implemented. I for one could never run my own voting node but currently, the combined importance of all delegates would meet the requirements.

Reflections of a space pirate captain

So Jaguar has really been on a roll whilst I have been on my holidays. I am not going to summarise this thread as it is already pretty succinct. I will however urge you to read it for yourself, it covers what NEM and Symbol are now, what they do differently, why they were designed this way and some discussion about use cases and future developments such as the concept of subChains (coming maybe not so soonTM but definitely coming). It is an interesting read.

Another retailer accepting XYM payment

You can now buy your bento boxes and what looks from their instagram like a lot more from @linopot_marche in Kamakura, Japan. Always good to see yet another outlet accepting XYM payments. I am still hoping to get to Japan after international travel opens up and write an article where I try to survive for 24 hours only using XYM payments. At the rate that things are going, I should imagine this won’t be hard to do by the time I get to write it.

Spot of golf anyone?

I have never played a game of golf in my life but as I get older I have a feeling that the golf bug will come calling and before too long I will be one of those middle-aged men that goes off to the golf course of a weekend 😆 For now I am safe but if I ever take up the sport then these will be the balls that I use! @symbol747 has created these excellent Symbol-branded golf balls and he is giving away 10 of them, I should imagine that they have all gone by now and I am guessing that international shipping is probably not an option (I have learned that sending things from Japan can be really expensive). Do check out the original tweet and give him a like and/or retweet at least 🙂

Cyber faucet

I love this, in fact, I love *all* of the new Symbol designs and rebranding so far. I guess this is a relatively minor thing in the grand scheme of things but I think it will be details like this that attract newbies that are drawn in by the cool designs and stay for the product and the community. Also reminds me that I need to level up my DIY skills and fix the leaking kitchen tap (British for faucet) as otherwise, I may end up a single man before too long 😁

Don’t mention the price 🤫

OK, this is the thread to read if you have been watching the XYM and XEM prices over the past few weeks. I am pretty sure that for three or four years my general mood was strongly correlated to price but writing the blog and learning to be cool has made me more resilient to market swings. It is crazy really. If you are anything like me then you have next to nothing in your bank account and your entire future tied up in crypto so I get the frustrations and worries, I really do. However, take it from me, contributing to the community will make things just a little easier and you can take comfort in the fact that you are contributing to the success of the project that all of your earth money is tied up in.

And a final bonus tidbit at the end of the post. We should see some new faces (well avatars at least) in the new year. Hatchet is going on a hiring spree, can’t wait to see what we will achieve with a larger team and a clear set of objectives.

Symbol Open Apostille

It looks like a tesnet release of Symbol Open Apostille is now live! It will allow you to upload an image (is it only open to image files?) with tags and then the document is time-stamped and recorded on the blockchain. The data itself is not stored but instead, a unique file hash is recorded in the transaction proving the identity of the image and the time and date it was submitted. Apostille was originally implemented for NEM but this will open up this notarisation capability on Symbol too once the mainnet release is live. I didn’t find any English documentation but I have to admit I didn’t look too hard (I am on a strict time schedule again today!) 😁 I am sure that more information will be released when the final product goes live.

Ah, I just realised that Open Apostille was also already released on NEM – sorry I am so Symbol-centric nowadays 😬

Good karma

This sounds like an interesting project and it is currently under development on Symbol. I don’t know too much about it at the moment but it looks like KarmaPoint will be a system to reward people that are going above and beyond and contributing to a cause or generally doing good things. It is nice to see something genuinely uplifting coming out of the cryptospace and I will be keeping an eye on this project in the future.

Let’s get building

Another great proactive step from @tsubasa_yozawa here. If my trusty machine translation has served me correctly then he is looking for developers to help him to develop apps built on Symbol. This is not something that I can help with but if you (or someone you know) can then maybe pass this information on. The more we build, the better.

Thanks and happy new year!

Thanks to everyone for reading and thank you all for your amazing support in 2021! I really appreciate it and it really is great to be part of such a wonderful community 😊 Enjoy tonight whatever you are up to, hope you are not too hungover tomorrow and HAPPY NEW YEAR!! I hope that it is a joyous and prosperous 2022 for all of you! 🍾 🥂

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NineLives
admin@symbolblog.com

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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