Hey everyone,
Can anybody provide a quick update as to what's been up to Monero development recently and what the short/mid term goals are.
Thanks.
I can provide a quick update, but I don't know if it will be a correct update
The current push is to get the 0.9 binaries released, which include major improvements over the last release. In-line with the development priorities after the block 20612 attack (
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8677607), the primary improvements are in the underlying protocol. I can't give a full rundown of what these are, and its been listed somewhere before, but IMO a main improvement is the movement of the blockchain to an LMDB database. LMDB is quite an impressive database solution - it has dynamic memory usage, so if your system has the available RAM and bitmonerod needs it, then it will use it. However, once its done needing all of this ram (mostly during sync), the 0.9 binaries use about 50 MB of RAM. Furthermore, LMDB was built to withstand database corruption. So if you lose power, or your daemon exits uncleanly, your database is intact. This is in contrast to mostly all other cryptocurrencies that use bdb, which apparently requires re-indexing or something after not-so-uncommon events. Indeed, I find the fact that monero is the only cryptocurrency using LMDB kind of ridiculous, considering that the entire technology is based on a database.
Currently with work with the database improvements is to ensure all of the failovers / other implementations are functioning properly... i.e., a bdb implementation is still necessary for 32 bit systems, and ARM systems also require a different solution than LMDB, so I think these are the final sanity checks before 0.9 is released.
Another interesting improvement is change of the base cryptography to the actual standard, as opposed to the cryptonote version of the cryptography.
The above two instances sort of exemplify the work thats been done leading up to the 0.9 release - the cryptonote codebase was a bit messy (apparently... im just regurgitating what I've been told because im no coder). Thus, in order to actually make the network stable, the underlying code had to be improved.
Additionally, there are some pretty core changes in the protocol being implemented for an upcoming hardfork. Primarily, a minimum mixin will be required - this significantly enhances the privacy of the blockchain. For research in the minimum mixin and mixin 0 problem, check out one of the Monero Research Bulletins. Blocktimes will also be changed to 2 minutes in order to try and fix the amount of reorgs that occur.
Finally, a lot of work has been done in simplewallet to increase the utility of actually using the monero protocol / blockchain / network. For instance, one can now use integrated payment IDs, instead of attaching a payment ID to a transaction. This also increases privacy because in the cryptonote implementations, payment IDs are unencrypted / unmasked etc.... essentially just plain text on the blockchain. Now only the sender and receiver can de-code the payment ID. There are also view-only wallets, providing users with some security knowing that intruders onto their hardware can't use their bins to spend their monero. Simplewallet sync times have also been improved.
Thats the stuff that manifests most obvious to me, as a non-coder monero enthusiast that plays around with the software to beta test etc. This is probably a disservice to the coders that have worked on this, because there's probably a lot more.
The next wave of work going into the next release will also be amazing. 0MQ is already implemented in the development branch, and its quirks are being worked out. i2p integrating is also going into the development branch. Ring-confidential transactions will also be in the development branch at some point, which means that now the amount of a transaction will also be private.
The easy answer would be to point you here:
https://getmonero.org/design-goals/Long story short, if I had more money I'd be buying more monero.
