Road to mainnet
We are in the last week and proud to say that both of us, Leomagal and Michael from Radixscan were betanet testers. I have to praise huge thanks for Michael to giving me that opportunity, since he provided the server I ran most of betanet on a German datacenter on a zero-cost basis. That provided the additional time to consider and the additional courage to make this huge step into mainnet validating. And since he gave up having his own node on mainnet, because of tax laws in Austria, we’re partening so that I have help from an absolutely trusted person, moving away from a one man team to a duo. Also mentioning we owe to the community a huge thanks to votes on both our betanet validator proposals!
Betanet is ending, mainnet is around the corner and we can’t wait to try out the last release before mainnet. Exciting times!!!
Cloud or not Cloud, that’s the question
Well, first of all, I think Brazil deserves a good representation in the Radix network, it would be very significant to be the first Radix node in the whole South American continent. Brazil needs to be well represented in something at least, right? lol
Prior to starting the mainnet endeavour I did some research amongst brazilian datacenters. Unfortunately the best ones require that I incorporate as a business, and there will be no more time to pursue that before actual mainnet launch, since it’s a very tiresome, overly bureaucratic and expensive procedure in Brazil. I will consult an accountant/lawyer soon to assess from a tax standpoint if it will be worth doing it. After incorporation, I can start thinking of moving out of cloud to on-premise.
So that implies we’re probably going to be running first year on AWS cloud provider, as I can have their services a regular citizen, not having to incorporate as a business, and paying a year in advance gets me competitive pricing. I can sincerely connect with the community dislike of major cloud providers against on-premise local datacenters or home setups. Indeed we’re not making this project to get Jeff Bezos richer. But in fact, from a IT point of view, the advantages they offer are just too valuable for any datacenter to compete.
As regarding censorship resistance, I can sincerely connect to the need of censorship resistance as one of the main value proposal of cryptocurrencies themselves, although I don’t believe at this moment any crypto is in fact censorship resistant because major international backbones and gateways are owned by big corporations, and they probably can filter crypto-like traffic based on pattern recognition software and shut it up if they want to - or at least condemn them to the underworld of darkweb and out of mainstream. I know this is a controversial opinion of mine, but I think we’re a long way of having a truly free internet. That, on the other hand, is no reason for us to give up pursueing communication protocols that are free in their ethos, like tcp/ip is free, so must Radix protocol be decentralized as it is conceived.
Security, security, security!!
Leveraging in what AWS can provide us, we’re setting up a whole infrastructure to protect our node against attacks, and our validator key and password against being stolen. That way, plus DDoS mitigation services, we are safe our node will have 100% uptime and will not the “low hanging fruit” to be attacked. Soon we’ll share more technical details for those interested. Below you can see a draft of what’s the infrastructure like:
UPDATE: We are currently using Grafana Cloud, which saves us in running a monitoring server, NAT and reverse-proxy
Where is the Node Stats Page on the Emmoglu website? Coming soon!!
Happy mainnet launch!!!
It was a long path for us and a yet longer path for GCs. We are proud and excited to be part of this. We pray for this endeavour to succeed and we all are happy and satisfied Radix holders! To the moon, and beyond!!!