STEEM Blockchain Freeze - What Just Happened - Unscheduled Hard Fork???

in #steem6 years ago

Almost 12 hours ago, the STEEM Blockchain simply stopped working. I initially thought with the website. But not a single web interface was working and I immediately got into checking on the witnesses as it is they who run the blockchain. What I saw was that 8 of the Top 20 witnesses were running version 0.20.0 AKA HF20 AKA Velocity.

So I speculated that somehow the scheduled fork for 25th September 2018 has been triggered. For those who don't know, STEEM requires 15/21 witness to approval for blocks to be irreversible. If 8 of Top 20 are disagreeing, we have no immutability. By default the blockchain froze as a safety measure to make sure that no mess is going to happen until proper consensus has been reached.

After Things Started Working This is What I Saw

Only 6 are running version 0.20 and there used to be 60+ witnesses running version 0.20 which has now gone below 40

@yabapmatt was very helpful on Discord helping to make things more clarified and for now my speculation stands that there was a bug that triggered HF20 before the set date and when the 15/21 witness approvals were lost, the HF 19 wasn't working as intended anymore.

If anybody has a better idea on what happened, let me know on the comments

PS: Don't but the FUD. What we faced was an inconvenience. No other crypto has done 19 successful forks. They are not active as STEEM and STEEM only froze. Your funds were safe. Nothing happened to them.

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Let's hope the prices will not have any major bear runs.

Watching people melt on the #steem tag on Twitter today was fun, sometimes stuff doesn't work, its still in Beta

Thanks for letting us peeping behind the curtains. The whole thing works fine, but such events show us that it is only another graet illusion.

While no harm was done, I think that the communication of the problem and the downtime issue needs to be addressed as it could lead to impacts to prices as they continue to trade on exchanges. With little information over hours, many could flood the markets with sell orders given the uncertainty.

Actually the opposite happened.

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