So a bit of a status update on development, and that is that we are jumping straight to v0.2.0 in the roadmap and skipping 0.1.0 altogether.
What has been achieved:
1. Blockchain size and speed reduced and increased significantly.
2. Nodes will now be active for all functions, wallets and miners will connect to those local nodes and any changes to the blockchain will be broadcast to all connected nodes.
3. All nodes attempt to create and hash the blocks themselves but until 0.3.0 they will double check with the seed nodes that they have the correct data. Nodes which are not accessible from the outside world will always far and will always download block data from the swarm.
4. Generation of PoW is performed serially, so cannot be optimised with more cores/GPUs.
5. Data synchronisation is optimised to flow as fast as possible even if the nodes are underpowered, this will mean that regardless of state/stage transactions should remain atomic as all transactions are sequentially numbered and replayed.
6. Swapped to 1 min blocks to reduce the impact of a block being hashed and the time it takes.
7. Target inclusion is +30 blocks to give the network plenty of time to sync.
8. Difficulty is now super hard to reduce registration impact on the service.
What is outstanding before general release:
1. Memory leak in the sync mechanism needs resolving.
2. Transaction size when performing a transfer can become painfully huge, which is a basic design compromise of this system. This may not be resolved before release but will need to be looked into.
3. Windows wallet needs to be updated to use the new mechanism.
4. A public node will need to be made available for those unable to run Ubuntu 16/18.
5. Produce binaries for download of the wallet & miner.
6. Decide if the seed node will publish block data to a standard web server to be served up for wallets. This will avoid people having to run a node just to populate their wallet. Obviously this isn’t very de-centralised, but will offload one of the biggest
I have been struggling for time over the past few weeks, but just a few little niggles remain in the little bits of dev outstanding. Chief of which is the denominations system, which although solving some problems, causes others.
If we were to fix all tokens at `0.01` VELD, then to transfer 100 VELD to another wallet would require 10,000 new entries in the blockchain to be created. Which is quite heavy handed. Whereas if they are mixed, that transaction on average would be around 3,000 entries which is much better.
But you could also be left with a wallet full of 50.00 VELD tokens, so would be unable to transfer say 20.00 VELD to anyone.
So in that respect, the network also has to in the future (if this even becomes and issue) include some kind of “change” system/service which will be funded from the network fee collection pot.
But for the initial version it’s just something that needs to be worked around and the community members will just have to offer that service or, indeed I will if I can.
I’m looking forward to the release, if only so I don’t have to keep restarting the current service every couple of hours.
I stopped mining this a while ago. Will old coins be valid after new release?