Update: Friday, May 8 2015
Shadow Hard Fork Successful!We are happy to inform you all that we have successfully switched the Shadow network from Proof-of-Stake v1 to v2. This implementation required a hard fork of the blockchain that took place on Wednesday. The upgrade took a great deal of work from our developers and so we are pleased to inform you that everything went according to plan and was successful.
Why Switch To PoS v2?To answer some of the questions we have received over the last few days we would like to explain some of the advantages of switching to PoS v2 over its predecessor.PoS.v2 will give the Shadow network
extra security over the longer term as it is no longer possible for someone to save up coinage in order to compromise the integrity of the network as it no longer plays a part in the stake calculation. The new system is designed to solve security issues which made PoS v1 coins more open to certain theoretical attacks. Although a 51% attack has not been successful on any PoS v1 coin, we opted to upgrade to eliminate theoretical attack vectors before moving on to our next objectives. In addition, we transitioned from “scrypt” to “SHA256” algorithm which brings a number of improvements such as “SHA256” is more
secure and battle-tested and staking
requires much less processing overhead; overall this has resulted in a huge 60%+ reduction in the memory footprint of the application. To give you an idea the previous daemon used to consume between 650-750MB whereas the new one is ~200MB. Also part of this upgrade we have made changes to the way ShadowLite works; You can no longer stake if you are using ShadowLite wallets/Thin mode. The decision was made that staking should be a reward for securing the network and unfortunately lite/thin mode does not help to secure the network.
Bug fix!We inherited a bug from the latest bitcoin code base which under “certain” conditions left users with new installations with less than five peers. This has now been fixed in the latest release 1.3.2.3. This is not a mandatory upgrade and only required for those who are seeing less than 5 peers.
Shadow v1.3.2.3
Moving Forward!Finally, we have merged upstream to the great work rat4 is doing over at maintaining BlackCoin and in addition have also added additional code/functionality from the latest bitcoin codebase. We are currently working on the HD wallet, once it's finished Shadow will have the first HD wallet in satoshi based codebase. The key storage is done but there is still a bit of hairy leg work. We are doing it hand in hand with the messaging upgrade. Once that's done we will start working on the front-end of ShadowMarket!
Thank you for your continued support and trust in the Shadow Project. Have a great weekend!
The Shadow TeamRynomster (lead developer)