Monero MissivesAugust 3rd, 2014Hello, and welcome to our ninth Monero Missive! Sincerest apologies for the late posting of this one, there were some interesting statistics we were finalising that you will find below.
Major Updates1. We had a lot of fun giving a Git Crash Course last week Wednesday, and it was well received by all despite some technical issues with the sound. To that end, we've decided to launch a regular "Monero Fireside Chat" session as a way of both introducing the occasional new feature even before its announcement in the Monero Missives, and as an ongoing developer technical resource. We aren't sure of the frequency we'll do these, so we'll announce them as they're planned. Our first one will be this Friday, August 8th, 2014, at 9:00 EST (note: EST, not EDT) which is 14:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC +2 (aka FOST - fluffypony and othe standard time).
This week Friday we will have a very special announcement, before going in to a technical discussion, so if you are able to join us live for that then please do so. It will be broadcast live via Google Hangouts on Air, so you'll be able to watch it on YouTube, and during the dev discussion portion following the announcement we'll be available to take questions on IRC in #monero-dev on Freenode.
2. We've only recently started tracking our download stats (since July 15th), and we thought we'd share with you some download stats for Monero over the past 3 weeks. Our most popular download has been our blockchain bootstrap, which has seen 41 425 completed downloads in 3 weeks, around 74tb of traffic usage! Leading the pack on these downloads is Windows with around 78.2%, followed by OS X with 14.5%, and the remaining 7.3% snagged by Linux. The client downloads are quite interesting, too - of a total of 15 000 downloads in 3 weeks, Windows again grabbed 78.4%, OS X only grabbing 9%, and Linux grabbing a surprising 12.6%! This obviously excludes those that clone the github repo and compile, which is the majority of Linux users and OS X users (thanks to sammy007's Homebrew recipe). We'd like to thank the donations we've received thus far - it goes directly to many things, including covering costs like the bandwidth provision to help bootstrap new users.
3. As mentioned in our last Monero Missive, Poloniex added a number of XMR market pairs. In the 12 days since, those markets have had a combined volume of 5830 XMR, and it is growing on a daily basis. The additional liquidity for both miners and traders is certainly a boon to cementing Monero's market position.
4. We're happy to announce that Monero has been added to the CoinsSource Trust Index, with a
rating of 6 out of a possible 7 stars. More information on the Trust Index can be found on the
CoinsSource Trust Index page.
5. Most of the dev effort recently has been around a smoother and cleaner build process, which is important as we move towards continuous integration (through Jenkins) as well as deterministic builds (through Gitian). This will mean that binaries of the code that is currently undergoing testing will be readily available, and it also means that we will have a secure build process so that the binaries you download from the Monero website will be verified and verifiable. Over and above that, the QoS bandwidth management system is functionally complete, and will go into the main staging branch for testing within the next few days. Finally, the backend for DNS seed nodes has been completed, the source code has been published, and the Monero seed nodes are up and running. Integration of DNS seeds into the network seed procedure still has to be completed, but when complete this will ensure a safer and vastly more secure method of discovering the Monero network and connecting to it.
Dev DiaryBuild: we've added a Windows build script to make building on Windows easier (it's in /utils/build_scripts/windows.bat). Tangentially to that, we are moving away from the VS 2013 requirement on Windows, and switching to msys2 for dependency management and mingw64 for Windows C / C++ compilation. Progress on this can be tracked in mikezackles' branch:
https://github.com/mikezackles/bitmonero/tree/mingwCore: QoS is feature complete, although some peripheral components such as bandwidth utilisation tracking is still WIP. Completed work will be pushed upstream to staging for broader testing within the next week. Progress can be tracked on rfree's branch:
https://github.com/rfree2monero/bitmonero/tree/dev-rfreeBlockchain: the embedded DB work is exceedingly complex work that requires a lot of thought, but it is progressing at a clip. Abstracted code is being refactored, and tewinget has moved to a clean branch for this. Progress can be tracked here:
https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/tree/bc2Core: jakoblind has closed a number of github issues. The first major one is adding an optional blockheight parameter to a wallet refresh (ie. refresh from that point).
Core: the second issue closed by jakoblind is the addition of a set of RPC and CLI calls to retrieve the mnemonic seed or the view key for an open wallet. The new RPC call is query_key (a generalised call that lets you specify 'mnemonic' or 'view_key' as the key type). The CLI command is 'seed' to retrieve the mnemonic seed, and 'viewkey' to retrieve the view key. Wallets that are not deterministic (ie. very old wallets, or wallets that are specifically created as non-deterministic) will error out when trying to retrieve the mnemonic.
Core: as mentioned in the Missive, the source code for the DNS seeder is available:
https://github.com/monero-project/xmr-seeder. It is as simple as possible (and even a little hacky), but it is beneficial in that we don't have to run BIND to service requests. Instead, we use Gandi.net's API, which is advantageous in that Gandi supports AnyCast for DNS (rapid updates). DNS seeds are by and large a convenience feature, so a group of superpeers will still be available as hard-coded seed nodes, and there will be an option to forego the use of DNS seeds. DNS seed support still needs to be added to the client, possibly along with DNSSEC support. The four DNS seeds (delivered as A records for ipv4, and later on as AAA records for ipv6 when ipv6 support is better baked in) are at: seeds.moneroseeds.ch, seeds.moneroseeds.li, seeds.moneroseeds.ae.org, and seeds.moneroseeds.se
Until next week!
- updated by fluffypony
