Dear farmers,
We have heard from multiple farmers who have the farmerbot running on their farm that they received fewer tokens for the previous minting period.
Without logs, it was very difficult to find the cause of this. So we would first like to stress the fact that it is extremely important to keep your farmerbot logs so that we can look into any possible issues in the future. We will add this as a requirement in the manual.
Having said that, we did find two separate issues that may have caused a lesser payout.
RMB Issue
During the month of May, a reboot was required due to a network glitch. This resulted in the RMB relay having some downtime. The connection made by the RMB peer (which is part of the farmerbot setup) was not properly re-initialized. (The cause of this is still under investigation.) This resulted in the RMB connection being unusable and the RMB didnât receive any messages.
The easiest way to fix this is by restarting the farmerbot (see manual). This has been communicated on the farmerchat on May 17th by one of our developers.
We do realize that there are a lot of messages passing by and that itâs not easy not to miss anything on those chats. Due to the decentralized nature of the project, there is no way to personally reach out to affected farmers, but we acknowledge that we can do better at communicating such important information.
Power State Issue
While investigating issues where farmers believed their nodes under the management of the farmerbot did not mint properly, we did find a bug in the minting code.
In order for a node to be recognized as power managed and credited with uptime for its sleep/standby time, the minting code looks for a state transition, from power state âUpâ to power state âDownâ. However, the power state changes were not remembered due to this bug in the minting code.
This issue will be fixed before next monthâs minting payout, where there will be a re-minting of last monthsâ payout for the affected nodes.
As I shared in the farmer chat, I do hope that we can keep in mind the following points:
- We are an open-source project, so anyone is more than welcome to help out.
- We are a small team for the amount of work that is happening.
- We are not a commercial company. This is a project from everyone to everyone.
- For all issues I would like to ask everyone to please reach out to the live chat. We understand that sometimes itâs âfasterâ to just DM someone you know on the team but this is very counterproductive. It results in a loss of focus and time for our team and also leads to stuff not getting fixed because they get distracted by other things and forget about the telegram conversation.
- And lastly, if there is ever any compensation needed, this will come from within the team and will be ultimately communicated by me.
TF Tech, the company that is actually building the technology, has no commercial benefit from the Grid right now. As said, everything is open source and community-driven. We do believe the discussion should be opened about how to handle situations like these, where node payouts were affected by (in the meantime resolved) technical issues.
Our support team is online Monday through Friday from 8AM CEST until 11PM CEST. They are there to answer any questions about the project, point you to the right platform/documentation, and log any possible issues. For additional support requests, we can think of an SLA contract in the future.
The ThreeFold project is something that is very dear to our hearts and yes, mistakes sometimes happen with a team this small and ideas this big. But as always, we will continue to listen, share, learn, and grow.
Please let us know your thoughts on this,
Sabrina on behalf of the ThreeFold Team