Splinterlands' Plans for the Upcoming Hive Fork

For those who may not be aware, a group of Steem developers, stakeholders, and community members are creating a fork of the Steem blockchain called "Hive" which is scheduled to launch this Friday, March 20th, 2020. You can read more about the details of that here and here.

Many of our players have been expressing concern over how that might affect the game and the cards and wondering if we are planning to move the game to the Hive fork. We would like to take this opportunity to answer questions and address concerns to the best of our ability.

First and foremost, we want to be clear that when the Hive fork is scheduled to go live on Friday, Splinterlands will continue to operate as normal using the original Steem blockchain as the base layer as it always has. Splinterlands cards and other assets (DEC tokens, packs, etc) will not be forked as they "live" on a second-layer platform which is separate from the base chain and which is not forking.

Should there be any unforeseen issues or complications arising from the fork, we will address them as necessary, but we do not anticipate any problems at this time.

The Splinterlands team values the ideals and benefits of decentralization very highly, as we expect many of our players do as well, so we will be watching the development and progress of the Hive blockchain very closely and doing what we can to support it and to support our players that choose to use it for posting Splinterlands-related content.

We intend to cross-post all messages to both Steem and Hive on the @splinterlands and @steemmonsters accounts and we plan to use our airdropped HIVE stake to manually curate content on Hive just like we are currently doing on Steem. Additionally, we plan to allow HIVE tokens to be used to make purchases within the game along with the existing list of payment options as soon as it establishes reliable and reasonably stable market pricing.

When new players sign up for the game after the date of the fork, we plan to create their account on both the Steem and Hive blockchains so that they will be able to use and interact on both chains outside of the game using the same account name and keys. If a user chooses to change their keys, then it will be their responsibility to make sure they change them on both platforms, and Splinterlands will provide account recovery services on both platforms as well for any accounts that we have created.

The most common question being asked is whether or not we will be "moving" the game to the Hive blockchain - which would mean that all game transactions would be posted to the Hive blockchain instead of to the Steem blockchain as they are currently. This is something that we will be looking into but not something that we can commit to one way or the other at this time.

After the Hive blockchain launches (forks from Steem) we intend to set up a test site for the game that uses the Hive blockchain in order to ensure that everything would work properly and smoothly in the event that a decision is made to move there. We need to ensure that Hive will be operating reliably and have all of the tools and services that we need to support the game and that players rely on, which we expect may take some time.

Additionally, Splinterlands will not move to Hive unless we can ensure that the transition is completely seamless to our players. It should be akin to a switch to a different back-end database for the game and players should not need to prepare or take any special action as a result. Ideally players need not even be aware that it is happening.

Ultimately any decisions like this will come down to what is in the best interest of the Splinterlands playerbase (which includes a large and growing number of people from outside of the Steem ecosystem) and will include discussion and feedback from the players and stakeholders.

Lastly, we know that these are difficult times not just for the Steem blockchain, but also for the world at large, and we hope that everyone stays safe and we will be doing whatever we can to weather the storm and hopefully come out of this much better off and maybe, one day, reach that moon!


Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!

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51 comments
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Better safe than sorry. Good call. See you in both chains

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Why not cross-post all Splinterlands transactions to HIVE as well in order to make a future migration more seamless, if HIVE becomes successful.

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I read it like that anyway is an option, but they don't commit to anything before testing it because it depends on the STEEM-Engine, which btw. is kinda super wrong branded now... go Honey-Factory? xE

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Cross posting transactions wouldn't really serve any purpose or make anything easier. The transaction IDs, block IDs, timestamps, order, etc would all be different so the cross-posted transactions would not be usable for anything. IF a move happens, then it will just be such that all transactions before a certain date/time are stored on the Steem blockchain, and after then will be stored on the Hive blockchain.

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Wow, matt. Lots of people might want to read some thought of you on the HIVE. I checked your blog ~10 times the last 2 days.

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I think it would still be of value to cross-post and have two different sidechains of Splinterlands as well, one for Steem and one for HIVE with corresponding tx ids linked, so that a switch from one chain to the other becomes trivial.

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I think he's implying that it is already "trivial". It's just a matter of looking up the history on the right chain. No use in configuring a separate "side-chain" to cross-post to. That'd actually be more complicated.

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So many things in the Splinterlands back end depend on the blockchain transaction ID that this wouldn't really help.

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Makes sense from a technical standpoint :)

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IF a move happens, then it will just be such that all transactions before a certain date/time are stored on the Steem blockchain, and after then will be stored on the Hive blockchain

This will be more complicated than just switching to Hive from fork time. It would require future nodes to run a Steem node up to the Splinterlands transition and then a Hive node. But if you go with Hive from the split, then only a Hive node would be sufficient to construct the Splinterlands ledger.

I think if you're confident enough that Hive will be the primary community chain going forward, you should consider switching. Perhaps shut down the splinterlands gameplay, i.e. maintenance mode on the day of the fork. I'd personally rather have a couple day outage compared to a much more difficult time in the future generating the Splinterlands ledger and determining consensus.

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what about if I do not want to get payed in HIVE for cards? Or if I do not want to get payed in STEEM for cards listed? this is something to surely think about..

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You will not receive HIVE tokens for card sales on the market until/if the game eventually migrates to the Hive blockchain. This is something we have and continue to put considerable thought into, and there are pros and cons to each option and no clear "best" way, so for the moment we will be leaving things as-is.

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My bags are packed, ready for the next chapter!

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Maybe ask the playerbase?

Do some sort of voting?

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Thank you for this update before the hardfork. HIVE will help the communities move forward after this trouble time.

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should make a public survey to the whole Splinterlands gaming community, so that they know or see EVERYONE's opinions and which chain we prefer the game to be on or the one that suits you

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Seems reasonable to me ....

A little off topic but not entirely, I think it would be a good idea to let sellers/traders choose what they want to get paid in. This will create seperate small markets within the main one we all use today.

Ex.

Seller A wants $1 in STEEM for X card and doesn't accept any other currencies as payment.

Seller B wants $0.90 in HIVE tokens for X card and doesn't accept any other currencies as payment.

Seller C wants $0.85 in DEC for X card and doesn't accept any other currencies as payment.

The above will create competition and arbitrage opportunities which very likely increases sales transactions which is good for the game. It makes sellers happy as it ensures they get paid in the currency they actually want. It makes buyers happy because we now have more choices and can search out the best deal with what currencies we have to spend.

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Thanks for this update. Here I was thinking I'd have double the cards on each chain. :D

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I can imagine how troubling this has been being for companies developing your business over Steem network. Steem is a POC of what shouldn't be done on blockchain.

This remembers me of the early days of Joomla, when it was beta and many companies were founded to service extensions for it and helped on developing it, and when it was released its owners banned all extensions that weren't GPL, and so paid extensions became impossible.

Steem Monsters is by far the best blockchain game and I see no news of any under development game that would be anywhere as good. I humbly suggest you to, as a plan B, research how the game and its data could be ported to Waves, Cardano or Ethereum.

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That is reasonable. I wouldn't want the game to go under maintenance randomly because of instability on hive.

That said, Hive is the future so I will be doing all my posts over there. Splinterlands was basically what was keeping me on Steem.

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I with you Splinterlands! Where ever you go, I will follow lol

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What if one user creates account ABC on Steem blockchain and joins Splinterlands, and another user creates account ABC (the same name) on Hive blockchain. And then Splinterlands moves to Hive?

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This was my concern, too.

When new players sign up for the game after the date of the fork, we plan to create their account on both the Steem and Hive blockchains so that they will be able to use and interact on both chains outside of the game using the same account name and keys.

Doesn't help if they create their account another way. We almost need the front ends to check that any account buying a card, pack, orb etc has the same public posting key on both chains, before creating the transaction.

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I really really really don't want my accounts on both chains to have the same keys. I understand why they're starting off that way but everyone's first priority after the fork ought to be changing one set.

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Maybe they'll need to deny transactions for accounts that are too young and weren't made via splinterlands.io
I think I'd prefer to see a day or two of downtime, then a clean move.

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I don't see any reason not to develop a real solution for allowing accounts on Steem to indicate which account on any new chain they should be linked to.

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We're right at the edge of my technical comprehension at this point.
I'm just glad Yaba's a wizard.

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For that matter what if someone creates account BCD on Hive and then someone else creates it on Steem and wants to join the game?

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nice work and thanks for the clear explanation on things.

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Thank you for the official post.

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Very sensible approach! Thanks for this!

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STEEM will die as we know it very soon. The move to HIVE should be quick.

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Well done @splinterlands.

In-game assets are the most valuable thing here. Also sooner or later, IMO @splinterlands would need to make decision about which blockchain is primary place for the posts.

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(Edited)

I hope you will at least seriously consider that there are other options available besides just Steem and Hive.

Edit: especially given that several major players are being blacklisted by Hive. glory7 tradingideas wonsama fenrir78 gfriend96 are all currently on the list. I can't imagine switching to a chain that did that to some of my best customers.

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(Edited)

Well, they will be there, they just won't have any coins. Not saying that this is ideal, just clarifying.

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I understand that you can't move to something you haven't been able to test thoroughly enough.

On the other hand, I wish you could migrate as soon as possible. I think that the majority of users will move to #hive. At least those who are familiar with the background.

I will power down all my steem accounts as soon as possible. Will that make me unable to play Splinterlands? Too bad in that case.

Another important question - what will happen to steem-engine, tokens, tribes? Is the answer the same?

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I personally believe that if the game supports 2 types of coin purchase (steem and hive) that is definitely a plus and an extension to more players who comes in from both sides; just like how you have adopted TRX before all the chaos began.

I look forward that one day splinterlands will be able to have a wider acceptance of coins in the future (based on your own business advantage of course) but at the end of the day, which chain you will reside would probably based on which chain is more stable, yes?

After all, splinterlands is a separate unique game itself. It can choose which chain that is least troublesome and best to maintain; but definitely accepting different coins is a GREAT PLUS.


This post has been manually curated by the Decentralised Sustainable EcoSystem movement by various stake holders and charitable donors to support Entrepreneurs favouring a stable STEEM ecosystem
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They already accept a wide range of coins.

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Which privacy violations? I believe this comment was ported over during the fork.

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Good comments. Thank you for your information and insights. Stay safe out there. Tyranny is on the march.

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