Steem 0.14.2 Windows VS2013 Binary Now Available, Though CPU Mining is Already Pointless
About two weeks ago the latest Steem hardfork to version 0.14.2 happened and initially there was a problem with the availability of a Windows binary release. I have tried compiling one with VS2013, but had some issues with the dependencies and could not do it successfully and Steem 0.14.2 not being easy to compile on Windows is actually a problem. So probably the next hardfork will need to be improved to also be easier for compilation on Windows and not only on Linux as there are quite a lot of people using Windows, or maybe to have an official Windows binary release posted as well. One cannot expect everyone to be a programmer/developer in order to be able to run a Steemd node or have access to the CLI_Wallet on Windows and we are looking for making things easier for the mainstream user, are we not?
Fortunately @steem-id has posted a cross-compiled a Windows Binary usign MinGW that made possible running a Steem node on Windows again after the hardfork, but that release was having some issues for mining and was not recommended. Meanwhile CPU mining for Steem has become pretty useless thing to do because of two users dominating the miner-witness queue thanks to a privately developed GPU miner apparently. There is still no open source GPU miner release available for Steem, but CPU mining with the Steem client already is pointless as you will be hardly able to get anything. I have been using this release for a while running a local witness node for Steemit, but this release has a weird problem (for me at least)... every time I stopped it, it was not a clean shutdown (even though I have used CTRL+C) and even after replying the blockchain it still did not load properly. So what I had to do was whenever I needed to restart the Steem node to redownload the whole blockchain and that is actually a time consuming process.
Yesterday @alphabeta has released a 64-bit Windows binary of Steem 0.14.2 compiled with VS2013, so you might actually find that release useful, but not for mining. Even though this release should be just fine for CPU mining it is already pointless in wasting power in trying to mine with a CPU and you should probably wait for a GPU miner to be released as an open source solution. What you would probably want to do with this release is to upgrade to it if you are running a Steem witness node or just a local development node like for a bot on Steemit as it does work better than the MinGW compiled binary mentioned already. I have switched to that release already on my local Steem node running on Windows used for the operation of the bot @robotev and it seems to be working just fine and not having the issues that I've experienced with the MinGW binary (though there could be something regarding the setting up of single/multiple seed nodes in the config). So show some voting love to @alphabeta for compiling and releasing a 64-bit Windows binary of Steem 0.14.2 compiled with VS2013 by voting for his post.
If you are using a local Steem node with a Python script for a bot or something else and you are getting the following error message and the same script was working before the 0.14.2 hardfork you just need to edit the config.ini file as a bit. You need to add support for tags in the config and the problem with the error message should be resolved, hopefully in the net hardfork this will not be an issue anymore.
public-api = tags_api
enable-plugin = tags
Just enable the tags by adding them in the respective public-api and enable-plugin settings in the steem config.ini file like in the example above, do not remove the others that are already defined for these in the config file!
If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.
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