Steemit.com and Nodes Operational
Hello Steemians, steemit.com is back up as are all of Steemit’s nodes. Over the weekend the chain halted due to a bug in the curations reward curve that was unrelated to the previous halt or the delegation bug. While all services have been restored, and operations appear stable, we wanted to take this opportunity to fill you in on what occurred. A more thorough investigation will be conducted and more information will be shared after our next retrospective.
We were able to develop a patch which did not necessitate a hardfork, however, it did require a replay of our nodes which are used by steemit.com and other Steem applications like Steem Monsters. Witnesses upgraded using the patch and resumed block production on September 2nd at 06:26:42 UTC. Around 13:00:00 UTC on September 3rd Steemit and the Steemit API services were restored after replays were completed.
The Bug
The bug was especially resistant to detection because the problem was not with the mathematics backing the curation reward curve, but subtleties in the integer based approximation of a square root. The bug was the result of a subtle behavior in the new curation rewards curve that lead to votes being able to have a curation reward weight of -1, which when stored in an unsigned field resulted in a computed value of 2^64 - 1.
When paid out, these votes were attempting to receive trillions in STEEM. This was caught by other assertions which instructed the blockchain to halt block production and prevent the unintended behavior from impacting any reward distribution.
The Fix
The new release creates a floor for the curation reward weight in such cases to 0. This can only happen when votes are allocating very few rshares and would not receive a reward, so forcing the value to 0 will not impact how rewards are allocated.
We apologize for the inconvenience. We will be conducting a retrospective and sharing the results of that retro on @steemitblog, so if you would like to learn more about this incident and what we have learned from it, be sure to follow this account.
The Steemit Team
Good luck on attracting the masses and investors with these problems.
is that dog snoopy?
OldSteem went out fighting, much how it lived.
It's NewSteem time! Let's thrive.
!BEER cheers to the new STEEM :))
mister whatsup , in new steem whales are downvoting even good post who not agree. not everyone's thinking is same. every people have a own definition of good post. That's why they downvoting own way. some days ago my friend get downvote and when she asked to downvoter that why you downvoted me then he answered that your post is not related to crypto , post only crypto related topics LOL.
Your friend was likely using the wrong tags and misunderstood the flags. :)
This is in the nature of downvotes: they are misleading and are usually perceived as offensive and unfair. Nobody likes to see a red flag or disappear his comment half invisible. This is always followed by an emotional reaction. If you want it to be emotional, this is of course the best method.
Instead of misunderstanding, one could also choose an alternative method. Usually it costs more time and energy. If you want to be fast, you won't take the time to look for alternatives.
However, I would think there is no such thing as "wrong tags", because the categories are freely selectable. I can decide which tag I take for what. Only because someone is perhaps cheeky and places his topic to adopt the methods of advertising for himself, he does not deserve a downvote. Is my opinion. Those who are bothered by someone using a "wrong tag" can safely ignore the content after all. The policy at @steemstem says exactly this: You can post under the "steemstem" or "science" tag, but whether you are perceived or read is a completely different matter.
I think everyone has the intelligence to recognize when a tag is a phoney and decide whether or not to pay attention to the content.
If you would like to use a platform that has eliminated downvotes you really should go check out whaleshares.com
If you want to earn Steem, we have to have a way to curb abuse. So, if the downvotes are too much for everyone to handle I guess we should just pay all the inflation back to stakeholders and take the financial end out of this entirely.
I still haven't made up my mind what I use this platform for and if money making is my first goal (guess not). The place here has many different faces and they appear according to what the people make of it. I came here for blogging purposes and thought that being voted on my blogs are an interesting thing to experience. I heard a lot about decentralization and saw it probably as an inspiring and interesting field of experimentation. Went through the usual ups and downs. Learned a lot.
I've got some ideas how abuse was rising within a system in the first place and how it could be lessened in the long term. I favor an indirect approach which I explain on my blog.
Never been on whaleshares.com - so there is no downvoting?
They eliminated downvotes entirely. It's been messy for them
Very appropriate. This ought to and should be done expeditiously!!
Amen....
Someone pretty smart worked this out!(hope they got a beer)...Still, it does seem the kind of thing that should have been picked up on the testnet?
-is there a key reason it wasn't spotted, are you improving the test environment to pick this kind of thing up moving forward?
This is very necessary! Thanks for bringing it to their notice!!
Thanks for digging the Steem Grave a bit dipper. Great Job Team!
Lol more like functioning alcoholic
a beer here and there :))
Ok now that was funny
Your obsession with @berniesanders is pathetic. Get a life.
Thank you for the update. I am glad the new steem is back
glad too
me too
Have you guys fired @elipowell and @vandeberg yet for utter incompetence?
Don't you think it's about time to get some professionals who actually know what they're doing on board?
This is embarrassing for the Steem community.
Hahhah, I literally started laughing out loud when I read this.
I think they hired @elipowell because they figured all the crypto nerds would bite their tongue slightly more than the way they laid into @ned 's incompetence.
They probably pay her $220,000 or more a year. I guess the joke is on us over here as investors as they keep slamming the price with their programmatic selling.
Just think if STEEM prices could at least stay up with projects like Bitcoin Gold and all the orders we have been putting in this bear market going to stuff like BTC, LTC, XMR, ZEC.....etc was going to STEEM.
@inertia has a good question. Who do you think Steemit Inc should hire to clean up the financial disaster?
look.. I just took ~60/70 downvotes because I defendet you Bernie and I dont even know you!
Why would you want to defend the most prolific abuser here?
Who do you have in mind?
look at that, someone is really angry at me:
@freebornangel here is the drama :))
But Bernie, I thought you are a moderate democrat?
You are embarrassing for the Steem community.
Chasing of investors away.
If your plan is fuck this place up you are succeeding
Your obsession with @berniesanders is pathetic. Get a life.
What a fucking joke. You wrote messages just like this one bashing iflagtrash.. fast forward 2 years and you ARE iflagtrash.
You are the one behind the whole entire thing. Otherwise they would have banned you just like coin instant for death threats.
I see straight through your bullshit.
You fuckin Larp
@valued-customer @joe.public
Well, Bernie took off and was not very polite, but your message is disrespectful and full of sware words... I don't know either of you, but let me tell you - you're the destructive one here.
I do dislike that.
Thx for the update. I think the next hardfork needs a better Testnet testing and also the time for a complete replay should be optimized, maybe by introducing checkpoints that can be loaded more quickly than replaying the whole blockchain.
After having some replays I'd love to see some way to get faster replays. Great suggestion :)
100% right!
Impressed by how quickly the bug was detected and a fix provided considering the time of the week this happened. Creds to Justin and Vandeberg in particular for providing a solution.
After sleeping till 3pm today to catch up after a marathon of ensuring our own witness got up and running asap, I can't help but respect the shit out of everyone else who was present over the last 48hours.
They really did work their butts off! Steemit is so fortunate to have such a dedicated team!
We shall all respect the hard-working and firm people in our lives.
Someone had to frick up at first - testing is not a light task! Testing in important projects can take up to 40% of the time, not in this last HF. Don't do that again!
I read your comment and it's right to cheer at firefighter, but in this case... some of them might have also been the ones seeding the fire! That is not ok.
Just praying the price goes back up over $3