It has been a long wait for since the June 8th announcement of Graphene and the plans to upgrade to BitShares 2.0. Back in June we said that we would complete BitShares 2.0 by the end of the summer and that we would give a 30 day notice after completion before upgrading. The last day of the astronomical summer in the Northern Hemisphere is September 22, 2015 which means we have reached our goal and can start the 30 day countdown 11 days early!
Test Net ResultsOver the past 2 weeks we have been running a test network non-stop that has proven to be reliable. Despite some known issues with the P2P networking / synchronization code we feel confident that a reliable network can be launched in a month and that we have sufficient contingency plans if things cannot be fully resolved in time.
Durring this testing members of the community have hammered the blockchain with as many transactions as they could produce. People were running out of test BTS with which to pay fees. These tests pushed throughput up to 20 transactions per second and the network kept chugging. You may notice that 20 TPS is a long way from 100K TPS so I would like to explain this a bit.
The performance of the test network is mostly hindered by existing P2P protocol and not by the CPU load of processing transactions. To reach 100,000 TPS would require high-end servers with Gigabit, low-latency, connections between them. At a minimum it would require 30 MB per second just to receive the stream of data in real time. This is clearly beyond the reach of our humble testers using low-end VPS nodes.
The real proof-of-performance/scalability lies in how quickly we can replay the blockchain once we have it downloaded. Our replay performance continues to be above 100K transactions per second. The networking issues will get resolved as demand increases. For now the existing protocol can easily handle 3x the volume of Bitcoin which is over 30x the current volume of BitShares transactions. By the time the network is averaging 30 transactions per second it will be earning an average of $8000 per day in fees ($3M per year), the market cap would be much higher, and as a result worker proposals would easily be able to fund all of the innovation needed on the networking layer.
Changes since JuneA lot has happened over the past 3 months and some compromises had to be made to reach our goals.
1. Postpone Bond MarketBack in June we announced on the forum the decision to postpone the Bond market features until after BitShares 2.0 was released. This decision was driven by an inability to fully test this feature and the belief that it was the most likely to need refinement, community feed back, and that it would woudl be unusable without a GUI.
2. Added Confidential / Stealth TransfersOne of the things we lamented in our original announcement was that bitcoin-style privacy was an illusion. Ironically on the same day we announced Graphene and BitShares 2.0, Blockstream released an implementation of Confidential Transactions which is well understood and computationally viable. After reviewing their approach we decided to implement them in Graphene for BitShares 2.0.
Confidential Transfers hide the amounts being transfered while still allowing those who validate the blockchain to verify that the balances transfered sum to 0 and are not negative. Stealth transfers are used to automatically generate a unique key for every transfer. The combination of these two features means that it becomes pratically impossible for a 3rd party to identify how much you have sent or received or who is sending money to whom.
If you are willing to reveal who is sending to whom (but not how much) then it is even possible to use confidential transfers with regular hierarchical threshold multi-sig accounts.
Currently the web wallet does not support generating or receiving confidential transactions, but the command line wallet has full support for them. More details on how to use confidential/stealth transfers will be made available in the weeks ahead.
3. Added Desktop ClientNot everyone wants to rely on a web browser to secure their funds so we have put together a new desktop client that can operate either as a full node or a light node. This client uses the latest Qt WebEngine which is based upon Chromium rather than Webkit and should be much more stable than the BitShares 0.9x wallets which were known to crash from time to time (especially on Windows).
4. Reduced Scope of Initial GUIWe had originally intended to have every feature available in the GUI on launch. We have scaled back the feature set for the inital release to do little more than provide at least the same level of features as BTS 0.9x. Some advanced features such as recurring payments, permission management, confidential/stealth transfers, asset management, and the like will be added as we have the opportunity to do so.
5. Increased Block Interval to 3 secondsOur goal of 1 second blocks has been postponed due to limitations in the P2P code we inhereted from BTS 0.9. Initial tests showed on a global scale the latency would result in too many forks without developing a new P2P protocol. We have designed a new protocol that should be have dramatically lower latency. The witnesses/delegates can lower the block interval to 1 second without a hardfork as soon as they are confident that the network communication can operate reliably at 1hz on a test network.
Launch PlansWe will be taking the snapshot on a Tuesday so we have time to prepare on Monday and support it through the rest of the week. The actual snapshot time will be the last block prior to 9:00:00AM EST. BTS 2.0 chain will then launch no later than 4PM EST, Oct 13.