Hi everybody !
I'm glad to see some activity in the namecoin world :p
Surprising :p
snailbrain & co : continue this good work, and don't forget to release the source code as soon as possible (otherwise there will be a loss of credibility, fear that you'll stole coins and less commits from other developpers).
On my side, I've started to try to use bitcoin 0.8.2 on the namecoin network. It is a very long work and if the namecoin GUI could bring more people to namecoin it is a good solution while all this is not fully ready (and it will take some time).
It seems some people try without success, and I may say that, indeed, there are some really small details that need to be adjusted in the code before it works on the namecoin network.
I'm also happy to see that midnightlightning has improved that wiki about merged mining, that will be less work for the one who will implement it :p
So, after some hours of work, here is what has been done :
- b94b68b Change ports for Namecoin 8336 : rpc calls 8334 : peer communication
- 3d39d31 Change defaultDataDir for Namecoin
- 137bcf4 Update Genesis infos for Namecoin main-network
- 3d172b8 pchMessageStart update for Namecoin
- a852cdd Update genesis infos & pchMessageStart for namecoin testnet
- 8c7622a Disable testnet ability to change difficulty before 2k blocks / Incompatible with the current namecoin testnet / Will be activated back when we will do a testnet reset
Here is what works :
- peer connections & first message exchange (sort of handshake with pchMessageStart)
- mainnet & testnet genesis blocks support
- block downloads (standard bitcoin blocks only)
Here is what doesn't work yet :
- "bitcoin" is written everywhere (a simple search and replace will not work)
- checkpoints are still bitcoin's one
- same for dnsSeed
- same for irc channel
- same for all different fees
- transaction with names (so blocks will be refused too)
- blocks with merged mining
- name_* rpc calls
- alert private keys
- I don't know if the GUI will use name tranctions as standard transactions or not (if the coin tied to the name is spent, you may loose the name)
- a current namecoin node should be upgradable to the 0.8.2 release (do you see reasons why it won't be possible ?)
One important thing to know before coding more is what is the best way of adding namecoin features in this bitcoin base code while allowing easy integration of future bitcoin releases into namecoin.
Satoshi... oops.. Vinced, has done it with hooks to minimize the number of changes in the bitcoin code.
The namecoin code itself is a list of functions with duplicated code and other good programming practices :p
So, next step may be to take some time to do things well for the future.
Last blocks validated by my 2 nodes :
- mainnet : 11110 (block rejected by checkpoint lock-in at 11111)
- testnet : 545 (block rejected by checkpoint lock-in at 546)
Next blocking points will be transaction with name registration :p
Code is available in my tree in the namecoin_v0.8.2rc2 branch :
https://github.com/khalahan/namecoin/tree/namecoin_v0.8.2rc2Remember, it's not usable in production or with your main wallet.
So, do not use them with your current namecoin data dir (use: ./bitcoind -datadir=a_new_folder, and backup everything in case of mistake :p).
