BPX Beacon Client 3.2.0 beta 1 is now available for download. This release features the long-awaited plot compression and some user experience improvements.

💾 Download BPX Beacon Client 3.2.0 beta 1:
https://github.com/bpx-network/bpx-beacon-client/releases

Compressed plots

This release of BPX implements the new format of compressed plots introduced by the second major update of Proof of Space library. Plot compression works with a “time-space” tradeoff, removing some parts of the plot and recreating them on the fly during the farming. The new plots format supports 8 levels of compression, from 0 (no compression) to 7 (high compression). Each increase in the level of compression yields a linear decrease in the size of the resulting plot, with the tradeoff being an exponential increase in the computational power required for farming.

compression level	GiB per plot	GB per plot	% reduction	% change rewards
0	101.30	108.77	0	0.00%
1	87.54	93.99	13.61%	15.72%
2	86.03	92.37	15.10%	17.75%
3	84.46	90.69	16.64%	19.93%
4	82.86	88.97	18.23%	22.25%
5	81.26	87.25	19.81%	24.67%
6	79.65	85.52	21.39%	27.18%
7	78.05	83.81	22.97%	29.79%

Why have we released a compressed plot format? If a technology can be built, then someone will build it. If only a small number of farmers had access to this technology, they would gain an advantage over everyone else. By releasing a free and open-source compressed plot format, no one will have a tactical advantage over anyone else. Additionally, integrating this Proof of Space update allows all users to farm BPX with their compressed plots created for other projects. However, we do not encourage anyone to replace their plots with compressed ones. Compression is and always will be optional.

GPU plotting and farming

GPU plotting allows for significantly faster plotting times, greatly reducing the time spent generating plots, leading to energy savings and a quicker farm setup. This release includes the Bladebit 3.0.0 plotter, which supports GPU plotting on any graphics card with CUDA technology.

The new GPU harvester allows you to use the GPU power for all computations needed to farm compressed plots.

User experience improvements

We received a lot of feedback that BPX is a bit too complicated for novice users. Until now, to know if the node was working properly, you had to track the logs of both clients and know what they mean. In this release, we have added many informational improvements. The GUI will now also show whether the Beacon Client is connected to the Execution Client, and whether the latter is synchronized. If farming is not possible due to problems with any of the clients, an appropriate status will appear in the Farming section, not as before, where nothing indicated a problem, as long as the farmer was working properly itself.