Report: What’s going on with Silicoin Mainnet?

On October 26, 2021, Silicoin Mainnet launched. When the network was running, a bug appeared. Some people could tamper with the code to bypass staking, which led to unfairness. Even if almost no one would cheat in farming, we acted immediately, suspended Timelord, and the team are fixing the bug to protect the benefits of all Silicoin miners and the fairness of the network.

To be honest, we are appreciate the guy who finds the bug. Silicoin needs more and more geeks like him to join us. If it is possible, we hope there are cooperation opportunities with every experienced programmer to achieve a more glorious future for Silicoin.

What Happened

In the Silicoin community, some people mistakenly think that this is a hack. In fact, we can say this is a bug and it is not a hack. In other words, it will not impact the network security issues that many people are concerned about.

Silicoin tries to introduce a staking mechanism based on Chia's time-space proof, so that miners can obtain reasonable mining income in a fairer condition. The amount of coins staked will affect the difficulty of providing time-space proofs, which is equivalent to expanding or compressing netspace.

The implementation of the staking procedures leverages UTXO. The staking and redemption are actually transfers between wallet addresses. Thus, the process is robust and safe. However, the verification steps for staking were designed too straightforward. As a result, it forms a loophole, giving malicious miners a chance to bypass the staking mechanism and obtain a better probability of block generation than honest miners.

Actions Being Taken

To solve this problem, it is necessary to introduce a more complete verification mechanism of POS. The original consensus implementation of Chia is used to verify the proof of space-time. At the same time, the newly written staking validator is used to verify the staking status of each block.

The team checked all the codes and make a plan to fix it. After evaluating all the related workload, the team estimated that it would take 7 to 10 days. But sure, we will speed up the coding speed under the premise of ensuring the quality of work.

Voting to restart or not

During the time fixing the bug, we need the opinions from our community to decide whether to restart the network after the bug fix.

The pros and cons of the restart are as follows.We hope that you join the vote to determine whether the Silicoin network will restart or not after careful consideration.

If restarted,

1. those who exploit the bug can not get the profits by using this bug;

2. for staking farmers, they can start and mine in a fair environment;

3. on the cognitive level of the consensus mechanism, everyone will be the same because now most of the farmers know what is the staking and how it works;

4. Bug will be resolved more thoroughly, and the restarted new network code is cleaner.

SIT will be airdropped to the holders based on a snapshot of the block height 16800.

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If don’t restart (means just upgrade and continue the network),

farmers who don’t pay much attention to community information can continue farming after entering the network after the 16800 block height. If this is the case, there will be more farmers on the entire network, and the Silicoin will be larger; And farmers can continue farming during this period to earn sustained SIT benefits.

It means just Forced Upgrade to continue the network.

The Silicoin team hopes to hear the voice of the community, please actively participate in the vote in our discord https://discord.gg/mquDag2anf

Together for community

Although we have various reasons and difficulties, we have to admit that we did not this time. One of the key fact is that our team is not good at communicating and working with community.

Therefore, under various opaque and unfriendly accusations, we decided to establish a "Community Association" as the foundation of Silicoin DAO.

Regarding the plan of "Community Association", if you have any suggestions, please send them to info@silicoin.cc. We look forward to your ideas and helps.

Finally, thank you, Silicoin farmers, for your long-term support. Without your tolerance and doubts, there would be no Silicoin's current scale and potential without your encouragement and patience. Let’s keep moving.