Chaos Unicorn Day, April 1 2019 (aka kill our cluster)

Chaos Unicorn Day is an event for projects in Ethereum and Web3 space. It is a challenge to turn off centralized services for 24 hours and practice what we preach. These include things like:

• clusters
• Infura access
• Etherscan
• IPFS gateways
• Etc

Basically, anything that can be classified as a gateway or is paid for by any entity. More broadly: anything that can be shut down at all, should be.

(Status) What does it mean for users?

From April 1, 9 AM UTC to April 2, 9 AM UTC you will not receive messages or see message history.

Workaround: Add custom bootnode and mailserver. You can search for existing ones shared by community in twitter using the hashtag #chaosunicorn or mentioned here, e.g. this You can also run your own mailserver/bootnode as described here

In addition:

• On Status mobile app 0.11.0 you will not see transaction history, fiat value for assets in Wallet and get an error after attempt to send a transaction.
• On Status desktop app before 0.11.0(get it here) you will not be able to add custom bootnodes or mailservers in the UI.

Why?

The goal of decentralization and censorship is wildely shared in the Ethereum/Web3 community, at least in theory. In practice however, too many projects, Status included, rely on centralized services and take shortcuts to get a working product or service. We want to change that.

This allows us to set the terms ourselves, as opposed to the terms being set for us.

(Status) Won’t this just break everything? What’s the point?

Very likely, yes. We’ll see exactly how though, as well as how possible workarounds work in practice. For example: setting up custom bootnodes, mailservers and LES nodes, then see how coordination works out of-band. E.g. sharing QR codes in Twitter, etc.

Individual teams can choose how much they prepare, e.g. dealing with bad paths. This depends on their priorities and how much shame they can handle. At an extreme end it might just be a single hack day, or it could be part of existing prios but reinforced.

(Status) Won’t this turn off our core user base?

We are still not in the app store, and our core user base is likely going to understand and be excited by the prospect, provided we communicate properly.

This is a perfect opportunity while we are still small and in beta. We don’t want to be “too big (and fragile) to fail”. This allows us to set the terms, as opposed to the terms being set for us in the future (Infura paywall, credit card for cluster blocked).

Cool idea but this site sucks.

That’s not a question, but feel free to contribute here!

Where can I read more?

Go here

How do I particpate?

Go here and let us know!

You can also tweet using the hashtag #chaosunicorn as well as join #chaos-unicorn-day on Status.