Please help Chinese community out with better experience

Discussion
#1

As I mentioned before, The people in China mainland are suffering the “turtle” response time of Nimiq. We have to wait for almost 10 minutes to open Safe wallet or the cashlinks. That’s extremely frustrating for new comers because they come to Nimiq for that slogan “Create an account in 10 seconds”.

Solution: please build some nodes in mainland of China for reducing the blockchain syncing time. As I know, you dont have to file an application to GOV for launching Nimiq nodes with only IP+non-443 ports. I hope it will work.
For CDN in mainland, you need to file your application, so for this one, it’s not easy for Nimiq, but what I can suggest, maybe try with AWS cloudfront. I know they have Hongkong option, or even ask for help from some members of Chinese community for sharing their account.

You guys are doing a really good job! We really appreciate your effort to make NIMIQ growing.
Thanks.

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#2

I was in China (Shanghai region) from october to january and I reported same issue to @Richy around november/december: I had slow sync time and sometimes I had no connection or had to use VPN. After few weeks he asked me to testagain and it was around 15 seconds and was working well. I’ve left China for now, so I am unable to help/check further.

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#3

yes, especially for the cashlink creation, it need almost one minute, it impact the customer experience, hope can fix it soon, you knew the purchasing capacity of China crypto fans is huge.

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#4

I hope you had a wonderful trip in China. The problem was there since day one. I spoke with @Richy as well, but the team felt like nothing could be done in that moment because there are some restrictions from GOV. If the team would like to go further in Chinese market, you must overcome this obstacle, right? I just made my point that Chinese market is very important, we should resolve this kind of “turtle” response time.

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#5

One of Chinese community members just claimed that he sold out all his NIM because he couldn’t enjoy the best experience. He hated to use Safe or cashlinks each time with VPN. It’s more complicated for new comers comparing with some cryptos.

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#6

Sorry to know what you are experiencing in China. Im hoping the team will take quick action. Is the anything that the community could do?

#7

I don’t think the community could solve this issue. No matter what, if team want to do marketing in China, that’s the thing we have to deal with.

#8

Keep it on the top until we have a official response from team.

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#9

What actions would you recommend the team take?

Also totally agree on bumping this until you get an official response.

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#10

I’m on it for a few days, collecting info. Will share something soon.

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#11

Thank you so much. :heart_eyes: If you can visit Safe with VPN (through China server), You are able to simulate it and you will understand what we are suffering …
Just let me know if anything I can help.

#12

I reported this issue officially to the team since I started being CM of China. In that comment, team answered they couldn’t do anything with it. I understood the situation, but now, I think we should move forward for Chinese market before we launch OASIS and Albatross if team really care about it.

#13

Hi everyone,

Here my feedback talking with Marvin (core) and Curd (dev-ops):

Setting up servers within China
From our experience setting up seed nodes in Hong Kong, there are two kinds of networks: an external (that can talk to the rest of the world with high speed) and an internal (that works far within China but is slow outwards). It’s easy to rent a server that runs in the external network. But to have a server in the internal one, a passport and extensive registration is required. Most likely related to the “Great Chinese Firewall.”

AWS Cloudfront
I’ll cite Curd here: “That’s actually sacrificing security for performance. In the current setup, I’d strongly not suggest it, since the users then basically hand off their keys to non-trusted web apps.”
But: Philipp (core lead) is currently experimenting with signing/verifying the shipped source code. If that turns out to be working, then we could actually use an untrusted CDN. Fingers crossed, that would open up an opportunity.
But: Citing Marvin again: “I am not sure if there are any issues with the CDN, as I understood issues are mostly around seed node connectivity” - so the performance issue would not be solved completely by this potential improvement.

Question: @Rob mentioned that after an improvement last year, it got much faster while he was in Shanghai. The improvement here was the release of the pico consensus. (FYI, citing Marvin: “The thing that probably really improved things in China is pico consensus. Chinese (network) have problems with keeping (web)sockets open, but for pico we only need a very short connection lifetime.”) I haven’t seen any reply to that, was he the only one noticing a significant performance improvement?

The solution
Marvin: “The solution to improve this is for people to run nodes in China. The connection gets better the more nodes are in China. Each of them has bad connectivity to the outside world, but as long as they can share new data/proofs with each other, the sum of them will have proper connectivity and if we put them on the community seed node list, all users will be able to profit from that.”
What’s most important about this is: while we as Team Nimiq want to help as much as possible, it is not really possible that (citing Marvin) “the community requests us (a centralized entity) to set up nodes in their country for better performance when nodes are the one part that it is important to be decentralized” - “It doesn’t need to be the Chinese community that sets up seed nodes in china, but it basically can’t be Nimiq or any of our companies, because of regulations.”

Marvin suggests, for example, Alibaba Cloud. And as soon as the those new seed nodes would be added to the community seed node list, they will become available for everyone thus making the experience better for everyone.

We’re happy to start a conversation around providing “NIM bonuses” for community members that provide seed nodes.

#14

Not a fan of Team Nimiq being referred to as “Nimiq or any of our companies”. While in this post you’re talking about how the effort to establish nodes in foreign countries should be decentralized, as a whole the team still seems to be centralizing Nimiq around them.

The solution of Chinese users hosting nodes sounds fine to me, makes sense and is more decentralized.

#15

Thank you so much for your effort to investigate the problem in China.

We all know the problem is caused by seed node connectivity and CDN and I think connectivity is the major one. That’s why I posted it here and tried to seek the solution from team.

Actually, as you know, I am not living in China, but I feel like I am the connection between Chinese community and team. That’s the reason I care so much about the user experience. I knew pico consensus, but I have never heard an improvement related to it in Chinese community for now, so I don’t know what happened in that moment and if Rob was the only one or not, but what I know is that the people in China mainland have to wait for over five minutes to open Cashlink. I feel really bad and kind of horrible experience to users.

I tried to host a seed node in Hongkong long time ago, appx one and a half year. I was able to run it only for a day due to expensive network bill (appx $500USD monthly in that moment, I don’t know what the situation is now). I think it’s the same situation in mainland as well. My question is that who is gonna host a expensive seed node without any benefit?

It’s a Pandora’s box. If we have connectivity problem, how come we attract new comers with current situation and who will host a seed node in China without any benefit if the Chinese users of Nimiq is few.

We have a few seed nodes hosted in different locations around the world by team and now we are expecting team could solve the issue by probably hosting one or two nodes in mainland, then we are talking about decentralized network… What?

What I get from the response is that team is not ready to move forward in Chinese market like exactly what I got one and a half year ago. I feel sad about it because there is no any change in this one and a half year.

@svub Thank you a lot, again . I really respect that you spent a few days with team members and give us the opinion of team. We all see the progress that team is currently making. I just hope the Chinese fans of Nimiq will be going over it soon, no matter who resolve the problem.

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#16

VPSServer have servers in Hong Kong, they are very cheap, and accept crypto for payments.

The $4,99 monthly plan is able to run a Nimiq full node perfectly fine :ok_hand:

Feel free to use my referral code if you guys want to support Nimizuela.org :smiley:

#17

I’m glad you bring up this topic and also the way of doing it: constructive and calm. :heart:

We want to work together on solving the situation, that’s for sure. :slight_smile:

Just speaking for myself right now, but quite confident, if somebody from the community would go through the process of setting up a node inside PR China, I think we can find a way to refund the costs. I’m handling the marketing budget right now, and honestly, I feel that would be money well spend from the marketing budget to make Nimiq shine in China. So, very direct, would you or do you know somebody who could rent the server and setup the seed node? Because AFAIK a PRC passport is required.

If so, please send me a quote of the costs and I think we can get this moving quickly. Compensation would need to be in crypto, ideally NIM.

#18

Currently I am working on NimiqChina.com. I already filed the application to GOV a few days ago to be able to host Safe and Seed node in mainland, but I think you can do some research about ICP if you are available since it can be easy to file application as an individual for Nimiq. I am not quite sure cause I only had a quick look on it. Here is the resources from AliCloud: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-detail/36962.htm. and you don’t have to file the application if you only host the seed node with IP+Non443 port. It’s not a perfect solution since the ip is gonna change each time it restarts, but it can do the job.

Thank you @svub again. I really appreciate your effort to support Chinese users and make Nimiq great in Mainland.

I will keep you posted about my filing application for NimiqChina. It usually takes 6 to 20 business day to get final approval.

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#19

@svub FYI. NimiqChina got its ICP number. I will move it from Hongkong to Shanghai and host a Community Safe in Chinese(includes Hub, Keyguard) for mainland users. I hope it could save some loading time, but if not really significant, I will try to build a seed node in mainland and figure out how well it could improve the current situation in Mainland and how much it’s going to cost monthly.

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#20

Thanks for your effort!

If possible, I think a seed node would be great anyhow. The translation makes a lot of sense, I hope we can soon also provide internationalization with the next upgrades. But I have one concern: hosting Hub and Keyguard (I assume something like hub.nimiqchina.com, correct?) means you have to secure the infrastructure. If someone hijacks the machine or the domain, then the people using your Hub and Keyguard are at risk to lose their funds. :confused: