Beg the devs to release this year because last years rise will be dwarfed by the amount of bitcoin on bittrex compared to last year. Great chance for Gulden to get noticed.
Reading between the lines of the latest dev update this month
https://dev.gulden.com/august-development-update , they would of been ready if they weren't making substantial improvements to the bitcoin codebase with SegSig. It will be finished before December from what I am reading below as the dev who wrote this appears to be disappointed about the delay.
Unfortunately I must admit I underestimated the amount of work involved in doing SegSig correctly, this happened on two fronts.
1) I have been aware of some small inefficiencies in the bitcoin transaction format for quite some time and this was always on our internal roadmap and what SegSig was intended to address (other than the transaction malleability issue).
I had never spent massive amounts of time looking into the transaction format. Once I started the work to correct these small inefficiencies some other less obvious inefficiencies became apparent to me, there was a lot more scope for improvement than I thought, and as I looked into those even more appeared, and so there was a bit of feature creep.
2) Despite the changes to the transaction format itself being “relatively small” it has knock on effects for an extremely large part of the codebase, the codebase has an extensive amount of parts that make assumptions about or make use of the transaction format code and need to be adjusted for the changes, While individually these changes are easy to make, I underestimated a bit just how many of them there would be..
In terms of the multi stage upgrade, I also slightly underestimated the work involved. PoW² is already a very complex beast to implement and having the backwards compatible change complicates it a bit more. I was prepared for this but there were some unexpected ‘incompatibilities’ with the existing Bitcoin codebase that complicates this, theoretically this complication shouldn’t have existed but it’s just an implementation detail of how Bitcoin handles things – and this is unfortunately the nature of Software Development that these things happen.
V) WRAPPING UP
And so here we are, a part of me regrets not sticking to doing PoW² as a solo release, it certainly would have been easier, in the short term it would have made a lot of people happier and instead of feeling bad about “letting people down” right now I could instead be soaking up all the praise.
However a larger part of me knows that even now with the delays this would have been the wrong thing to do, in the long term picture these delays are a very short period of time and when we are enjoying the benefits that they bring in the long term I think everyone will come to appreciate the long term game we are playing.
And so, while I am sorry there are delays and while I apologise to anyone who is disappointed by these delays I am not sorry that I have taken this decision.
While we have not released yet, the finish line is in sight and we will be there soon, stay tuned for more news to come.