February 8, 2018
Hi everyone,
Just wanted to send out a quick update on what the team has been working on for the last week or so.
Team updates
Right now we have 8 new names carrying the dev role that our core dev, Duke, is working directly with. Eventually some of those folks will be invited to the core team. Currently everyone is working together on various projects with HushNG and both websites at the top of the projects list. Most recently, the watch-only fix was
merged from the Windows branch to the main branch, and the process of removing the need for a special platform-specific branch was started. You can see technical details of what else the new devs have been working on on our
GitHub page.
Our marketing team is busily applying to exchanges. We've completed several applications last week and have organized a list of exchanges that we are interested in learning more about and/or applying to. We've received some great feedback from the community about which exchanges might be a good fit for Hush in regards to having reasonable fees as well as being the right size for a project like Hush. We're going through those recommendations as we speak. Thank you for those.
We are still actively recruiting for both groups.
Web Wallet
Although we don't have an ETA for bringing the web wallet back up right now, we do have two workarounds. The first is to use the Agama wallet to see your Hush balance. That requires you have your private key. If you have that, use the instructions on
our airdrop page to see your balance. If you don't have your private key you can download the web wallet and run it locally to retrieve your private key then use your key in Agama. The advantage of this is that everything runs locally and doesn't require sending sensitive data to a server you don't know. Downloading and running the web wallet locally is more complicated than using the web wallet and we understand that frustration. We are working on a How To to make this easier and we have a very helpful community answering questions in the support channel on Discord in the meantime.
Hush services
One unexpected consequence of our servers being taken offline is important to those of you running full Hush nodes. It has impacted the ability of Hush nodes to discover each other. This is called the DNS seed. Normally, when someone makes a request for identification of a node they receive a response indicating the nearest node. Instead of responding with the neearest node, the DNS seed responds with a *list* of known nodes, which speeds up the whole process exponentially. Now instead of trying a single address and making another request if it can't reach that one, a node has a whole list it can use. Our DNS seed was on one of the servers that were taken down and this is one of the projects that have taken precedence in the background. When this is resolved folks running full nodes should see a vast improvement in functionality. Feel free to track technical progress in GitHub.
Airdrop updates
Hush, Supernet, and Dex have all received their BTCH. As you might expect, BTC is a larger, more complex process but should be finished soon. The exact numbers and details will be in the full release of the BTCH whitepaper, which will follow shortly thereafter. We still expect to be able to meet our goal of completing the airdrop and releasing the whitepaper this month.
Next up
In addition to the projects mentioned above we will also be releasing details on HushList, our private mailing list-style messenger which utilizes zkSNARKS. We are working on a How To article with screenshots to show exactly what it looks like and how you can use it. It is currently command-line only and we are also working to provide an easier way to use it in the near future.
If you have an article, whitepaper, or how-to you would like to see, please contact us on Discord.
The community member who designed the BTCHush logo has graciously provided a design overhaul for btchush.org. We will be implementing that soon as well. We intend to provide redirect links on each website to our Discord to diminish link confusion. If links change, those pages can simply be updated to reflect the new location. A few of our new devs have also made some cosmetic changes to the Hush website. Expect to see minor changes here and there as our new group members come up to speed. There are a lot of good things going on right now. Please reach out to us on
Discord if you are interested in jumping in.