Did you take over max because it was a dead coin with a potential community ready to go, or did you get passed the torch from max himself - or whomever was running it for him? The development update didn't seem to cover that part.
I took over because I've always believed that Maxcoin has fantastic potential, has a great community, and was started by a couple of young developers who I think had the right idea and had their hearts in the right place, but fell short of seeing it through. I even helped a bit three years ago, not with wallet development, but with building and hosting a Maxcoin chat room and coordinating and planning with Luke (the primary Maxcoin developer at that time).
At no point along the way did Keiser ask me to get involved. Obviously, he's always been interested in Maxcoin but I've never seen any signs that he commissioned Maxcoin or dictated how it was managed. He's asked questions and expressed support, but in my experience, there's never been anything more than that. This is true even today. My involvement with Maxcoin has been totally my own initiative, and honestly, we'll need more people to get involved to turn Maxcoin's potential into reality, but hopefully this is the first step down that path.
I have access to the maxcoinproject account on here, but wanted to at least get started by using my personal account first because I want it to be clear that we're more or less starting from scratch from a resources standpoint.
Please post questions, suggestions, and feedback so that we can help Maxcoin live up to its potential!
Hi goombaloon,
Why not joining the actual team and support them directly? , no doubt they could use a skilled hand, somehow taking over (right now) is not a good idea, since the coin just entered on the radar and got a spontaneous regain of interest, at best it will confuse everyone and kill the coin for good... . By the way using a side account, no offense, won't help either.
Tell us who you are, give us your vision, your logistic, your plans, and maybe...maybe it could work, until then even installing a wallet (sources?) coming from nowhere is a big no no for me.
I'm sure you understand the concerns
Hi BTCspoon,
Yep, I definitely understand, appreciate, and even share some of your concerns...no offense taken.
Regarding why I don't just join the actual team...I have. Like I mentioned earlier, I was loosely involved with the Maxcoin team shortly after its initial launch 3 years ago. Today, the original developers are no longer involved (though I've contacted Luke here and there recently) and I'm working directly with maxcoin.org.uk and a few others on rebooting this project, so please let me confirm that I am not taking over this coin. All my recent efforts to get 0.9.4 released are captured on the Maxcoin Github project (
github.com/Max-Coin), not on some other fork or anything like that. The 0.9.4 download is available on the main Maxcoin github project at
github.com/Max-Coin/maxcoin/releases/tag/v0.9.4.0.
Regarding who I am...I've been a professional developer for 25 years. The vast majority of my experience is with Microsoft platforms, both pre-.NET using C/C++ and post-.NET using C#. I've also done a bit of Java development and work on other platforms, including Linux. Though I've done plenty of desktop development, the bulk of my work has been with web development.
Being that I'm full-time employed and have a family, I don't have a great deal of time to dedicate to Maxcoin, but I try to allocate nights and weekends as much as I can. As such, we will need other developers to join in if we hope to succeed. To that end, there are a few options that I'm currently exploring but would welcome more if anyone on this thread is interested or knows someone that would be.
As for my vision/plans...my first goal is just to get the Maxcoin codebase updated and build-able, deliver some needed fixes, and get some supporting infrastructure and tools in place so that we can then move on to more exciting things. To that end, I've done (or am doing, or need help doing) the following:
- Put a node online (dnsseed.maxcoinhub.io) and am coordinating to put a few others online (including dnsseed.maxcoin.org.uk) to serve as seed nodes for new wallet installations to sync easily. The lack of a well-defined and reliable set of seed nodes has been an ongoing issue, and this is intended to remedy that issue.
- Developed and deployed a REST API for querying the blockchain. This is available at api.maxcoinhub.io The source code will be open sourced on the Github project (it was written in C# / .NET Core). I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
- Developed and deployed a mining stats page that provides a hashrate and difficulty chart along with up-to-the-minute stats. This is available at node.maxcoinhub.io.
- Updated the codebase on Github to make it build-able again.
- Updated, expanded, and verified the documentation for building the source code on Windows and Ubuntu. These are available at github.com/Max-Coin/maxcoin/blob/master/doc/build-msw.md and github.com/Max-Coin/maxcoin/blob/master/doc/build-linux.md, respectively.
- Updated the code in 0.9.4 to use the new seed nodes created above.
- Updated the maxcoin branding and logos in 0.9.4 to match with maxcoin.org.uk (again, we're working together as a team).
- Deployed a development blog at blog.maxcoinhub.io that I'm planning to use to share this kind of information. In fact, I think my next post will include what I've provided here.
- Working to get the Maxcoin DNS seeder daemon up and running on multiple seed nodes to further remedy the node availability and discoverability issue.
- Provide a blockchain bootstrap torrent so that new wallet users can get the blockchain loaded on to their machines more quickly. Sync times for new Maxcoin installations is pretty slow (on the order of days), so providing a torrent of a periodically updated snapshot of the blockchain should hopefully provide some near-term relief.
- Optimize the Maxcoin blockchain syncing code so that the above bootstrap torrent is eventually no longer necessary.
- Investigate and address as appropriate the current list of issues captured Github.
- Build, deploy, and open source a new blockchain explorer that leverages the blockchain API built above.
Again, these are all part of an initial first step of "rebooting and refreshing". After this initial first step, then I believe we'll be well-positioned to move on to bigger and better things, which hopefully the community will help define and drive between now and then.
From this point forward, I will switch over to posting from the maxcoinproject account in order to reduce confusion or concern.
Thanks for the feedback and please continue to provide any further feedback regarding questions, concerns, or suggestions!