Hello Helium Community: The core team is working on 2 things today.
The core team found an issue overnight and is testing a fix on how a Hotspot communicates to its Validator to make it more reliable. This should increase the number of proof-of-coverage receipts sent back to the Network and should improve rewards.
This is getting testing time on Testnet as well as Mainnet on our Testing Hotspots. If this is a noticeable improvement, we will be issuing a Hotspot release (today or tomorrow).
The team, in collaboration with the community in the technical channels have also identified an interesting occurrence that likely manifests as a Hotspot “flatlining” or “doing nothing for days”: There is 1 process in the Hotspot that silently dies and never alerts anyone. This process is needed to communicate with the Validator the Hotspot is connected to. If this thing dies, the Hotspot is unable wake itself back up to respond to Proof-of-Coverage or even send Witness receipts; hence flatline. The core team is going to replace this process with another that already exists in the Validator code. Unscientifically, this may explain why sometimes Hotspots come back to life (about 25% of the time) after a reboot. This is not something the core team is recommending Hotspot owners do, but if you want to experiment, there’s not much to lose. Finally, the core team truly empathizes with Hotspot owners on the poor rewards. This is 100% the core team’s entire focus right now. It’s important not to point fingers at each other. We are in this together and in it for the long haul. If we can get these two issues fixed to bring back reward stability to the network, we can turn off chain syncing as early as next week. There is still an AMA happening right now, so please listen in! It will be recorded as well and posted when the AMA is complete.
Proof-of-Coverage Update @everyone I wanted to drop by with an update now that it’s later in the afternoon on our current progress.
The fix is now in a miner image 05.18 on both Mainnet (on testing Hotspots) and Testnet. This is to fix the missing receipts issue. We’re still monitoring the Hotspots but it is too early to tell. We will be back tomorrow to confirm that this is a release candidate and GA for Hotspot Makers.
This particular investigation will not be as fast as the others. There is quite a bit of surgery involved. The update here is.. we’re still digging. Lastly, the AMA video should be out shortly! There is one point I spoke about on the AMA about showing what Validator a Hotspot is connected to. I said on the call that we’d add it to the API and Explorer. After a technical discussion, we found that the chain itself can not reliably report the Validator name. Whatever it reports will be so out of date that the misinformation will be more confusing than helpful. However, there is a way for Makers to expose this information on their apps or dashboards so we will add this functionality and document this so makers can include it in their Maker apps and tools. The timeline for this is 3 weeks. Thanks for being patient and asking great questions on the AMA. We’re in this together
source: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=qLSVMSbDiOE
