We will reach out to Bittrex more after the hard fork. Adding a new exchange sometime in the next 10 days is difficult since they would need to update their wallets already to accommodate the DGW integration. It's easier for them to add us after we get through this.

Speaking of Dark Gravity Wave, the block countdown site, BelaDGW.com, was just edited to show the estimated time left until the hard fork occurs. Currently, there's about 11.09 days left.

It's finally here, we're integrating Dark Gravity Wave at block 715,000. You can track the block countdown at http://BelaDGW.com. If you have a desktop wallet, there is a mandatory update that you will have to get (more info at the end of this post).


What is Dark Gravity Wave?
A new and improved mining difficulty regulator

Dark Gravity Wave is an open-source cryptocurrency mining difficulty regulator created by Evan Duffield, one of the lead developers of Dash. It was created for the purpose of defending against time warp exploits, although its benefits reach beyond just that.

Whereas Kimoto Gravity Well (Belacoin's current difficulty regulator) only considers the difficulty during the previous block, Dark Gravity Wave uses moving averages to determine the best change to the mining difficulty. DGW retargets every block to act quickly against large fluctuations in mining power, and it does so in a controlled manner.


What are the benefits?
Regular block times and a more secure blockchain

Security: Dark Gravity Wave protects from the time warp exploit. This allows someone to mine a string of blocks and force his blocks over everyone else’s. Dark Gravity Wave was created with the purpose of preventing this from happening.

Faster Transactions: This is where most Belacoin community members will realize the benefits of Dark Gravity Wave. Belacoin transactions will take around 2-minutes to be processed whereas under the current situation, it sometimes takes 12 - 36 hours. Exchanges can also lower the amount of confirmations that they require for deposits since there will be no more time warp exploits.

More Miners: Some miners quit mining Belacoin since their blocks were being orphaned, causing them to lose their mining rewards. Bringing more miners to the blockchain makes it more secure, faster, and reliable for everyone.

Controlled Difficulty: Dark Gravity Wave uses moving averages to determine the difficulty of the next block. This protects it from malicious spikes in net hash rate that then jump off the blockchain, meaning we can continue mining easily and at regular intervals through those events.


How will my coins stay safe through the hard fork?
Updating your wallet or keeping them on an exchange / web wallet

If you have a desktop wallet, you will need to update your wallet to our latest release, v1.1.0.0. You can find instructions on how to do this here: https://github.com/TheAmbiaFund/Belacoin/releases

Another option is to send and keep your Belacoin on an exchange or web wallet that you trust. Your exchange will have to update their wallet system, and in doing so, all Belaccoin kept on their exchange will transition over to the new blockchain. We are coordinating with the exchanges on this.

Yes, we will have updates for the wallets very soon. We do post our large updates here, although conversations about our updates and news (as well as daily updates and smaller pieces of news) are all handled in the Slack. 

Finally in for the night and have enough time to write an update on the weekend. On Friday, we flew in two developers who have been working remotely for us, and they just left earlier today. We've finished the update for the Windows wallet, and the Mac wallet update should be finishing up tomorrow. These updates are crucial to making sure your coins stay secure through a hard fork. It also sets the stage for some much larger wallet upgrades / updates that will be coming soon.

Without going into much detail, we've had multiple meetings this weekend are helping to position The Ambia Fund and Belacam in a great spot when we begin to focus on scaling things up over the next few months. We've done extra work to get Belacoin listed on new exchanges, and we made some great connections as well. This week, we'll be picking up a new accountant to help handle things like taxes, alleviating some of the work that has bogged down the executive team.

We're looking into sending some representatives of Belacam to a couple blockchain conferences this summer. The Blockchains + Digital Currencies conference in New York City on June 13th is one that we are considering, although I'm not sure if we'll be able to attend since it's only 8 days out. We are looking at making a mark at the Blockchain Conference in Washington DC on July 28th (https://www.blockchaindc.com/). There, we would love to promote Belacam Gamma and make some great connections for both Belacam and Belacoin.


Also, we've got a new tagging system set up on Belacam Gamma. The Trending tags system is being developed, and we believe that this will bring new excitement to Belacam. One Poloniex-traded altcoin team has reached out to us about running charity and philanthropy promotions through Belacam, and this trending hashtag system will allow them to do that. For example, Apple is currently sponsoring the hashtag #WWDC2017 on Twitter to promote their Worldwide Developers Conference. With Belacam Gamma, we'll be able to do the same thing, just with money involved 

Yes, we have over 1600 members in our Slack community, and that's where we do most of our updating. People enjoy being in the slack because it gives them a direct communication line to us, we can easily answer questions, give daily (sometimes hourly) updates, and we share news there first.

Speaking of news, Belacoin is now listed on Coinomi's web wallet! Download the https://coinomi.com/ Free Secure Source-Available Multi-Coin Multi-Asset HD Wallet for Bitcoin and Altcoins to get Belacoin on your mobile Android device. It's a lot easier than having a desktop wallet, so this update puts Belacoin one step closer to mainstream adoption.

Dark Gravity Wave has been integrated into Belacoin's test net, and after a few days of studying its effects, we're ready to declare success. Now, we're preparing the code for an update to the wallets and picking a date for the official full integration on the main Belacoin blockchain. We'll let everyone know sometime in the next few days about the official date. We'll be reaching out to the exchanges that list Belacoin, Belacoin block explorers, and mining pools to update in preparation. We'll also put together an easy guide for those of you that are holding Belacoin in a desktop wallet. If your money is on an exchange, you likely won't need to do anything.

Come to our Slack at Belacoin.herokuapp.com (use https://belacoin.slack.com if you're already a member) to get more updates and to talk directly with us.

We have the block explorer built for the Belacoin testnet. We're going to let it run until Monday just to make sure that everything is working properly. If it is, we'll officially declare success and move on towards coordinating with the exchanges!

To be clear, DGW has already been integrated on the testnet, we're just making sure that it's working properly.

We're still doing great things. If you want to get involved in the Belacoin community, come check us out at http://Belacoin.herokuapp.com. We're integrating Dark Gravity Wave very soon, and we have Belacam Gamma coming out soon as well.

We've got a new Belacoin block explorer set up at https://chainz.cryptoid.info/bela. It's the best block explorer around for altcoins, and it gives us plenty of analytics that will allow us to monitor the blockchain's health and determine the best time to proceed with Dark Gravity Wave integration. Now that it's set up, we're moving on to developing the Belacoin testnet. After it runs for about 48 hours, we can run a Dark Gravity Wave integration fork on there. This will not affect the main blockchain, but it will allow us to make sure everything works in a controlled environment. Once successful there, then we move on to the real thing.

Dear Belacoin Community Members,

We are very excited to officially and formally announce our intention and plan to integrate the
Dark Gravity Wave mining difficulty regulator into Belacoin’s blockchain. This document outlines
our proposed approach to integration and elaborates on what Dark Gravity Wave means for
Belacoin.

Over the past few months, Belacoin has seen tremendous growth, growing from a market
cap of $140,000 when we first began working with the project to briefly touching $7.6 million
yesterday. This growth has brought a surge of community members, community projects, and
attention. As a result, the Belacoin blockchain has outgrown it’s old source code and is in need
of new, significant updates like Dark Gravity Wave.

Issues like orphaned blocks and long delays in transactions have been inhibiting our growth,
and you let us know that these issues are your #1 concerns at the moment. That makes them
our #1 concerns as well. Implementing Dark Gravity Wave will help remove those caps and
others that have been hindering Belacoin’s growth.

We recognize that many don’t fully understand Dark Gravity Wave and how important it is to
Belacoin. This document will outline the benefits, elaborate on our implementation plan, and
answer other questions that you might have.

Sincerely,

Andrew Feldspar
Communications Director
The Ambia Fund

Dark Gravity Wave Document: http://belacoin.org/DGW.pdf

The formal announcement is due in 2 - 4 hours.

Something we've been discussing and working on today has been integrating BELA/USD conversion estimates directly onto posts. This would allow users to see an estimate of how much money (in USD) a post has earned. The benefits of this are that users can see how other photos (especially quality ones) are earning money, so they can know that they can earn money too. The difficulty comes with how to give an estimated USD value when the price of Belacoin fluctuates. A post that has earned $5 one day may be worth $7.50 the next without earning anymore Belacoin because the price of Belacoin increased by 50%.

You can see the mockup in our Slack at belacoin.herokuapp.com or posted here: https://twitter.com/BelaCoin/status/862441389916921857

BELA/USD estimates on posts do make the path towards mainstream use and adoptionmuch easier.

Dark Gravity Wave will fix an issue that has been affecting the Belacoin blockchain where blocks won't be found for an extended period of time.

The Problem: Occasionally, there will be extended periods of time where no block is found on the Belacoin Blockchain.
What are the consequences of this? Transactions are not processed until a block is found. Your coins are 100% safe, but it can be frustrating to have to wait a long time to receive your coins.
Why does this happen? There are mining pools out there that search for the most profitable coin to mine and switch to it for as long as it is the #1 most profitable coin. A lot of the time, that coin is Belacoin. When these mining pools switch to Belacoin, the current difficulty regulator (Kimoto Gravity Well) spikes the difficulty to keep the 2 minute block times consistent. Then, the mining pools drop off because Belacoin is no longer the most profitable coin to mine, but the difficulty remains very high. Now, it can take several hours for the next block to be found. Once the next block is found, the difficulty readjusts back to normal and everything continues smoothly again.

The Solution: Dark Gravity Wave Mining Difficulty Regulator
Why is is a solution? Dark Gravity Wave (DGW) was created to solve this very problem. It takes more of a moving average so the difficulty does not spike so hard when a new mining pool hops on. It's more dynamic and flexible than Kimoto Gravity Well and will help reduce those long periods of time where no block is found.

Yes, the new notification system looks and works much better. It's now only a dropdown menu, similar to Facebook's, where you see the profile picture of the person who liked/commented/followed you, and you can click to go to their profile.

Belacam has about 2,100 users. We have been spending the past 3 weeks working on fixing bugs rather than retaining these users, so tracking the active users at this point is not indicative of much. After the launch of Beta 2.0 with the design overhaul, we will begin to focus on marketing to bring in more users and retaining our current users, so the Daily Active Users (DAU) / Weekly Active Users (WAU) / Monthly Active Users (MAU) will be pretty relevant then. The beta 2.0 launch is slated for either late May or early June. At that point, we hope that almost all bugs are stamped out, and we will begin working on things that maximize user retention. This is where we start A/B testing things as simple as the color of a button to see if it can incentivize people to post / like / comment more.

There is no public roadmap, although I will see if we can have someone make one. We follow an internal roadmap through Asana, but it's not in a publicly presentable form.

A simple roadmap could go like this:

• Beta 2.0 with site redesign
• Integrating Ads (so we can finally make some money)
• Integrating Video
• Integrating Chat
• Mobile Apps

Keep in mind that we're also balancing this with our work with Belacoin. On the Belacoin side, we're working on preparing to adopt the Dark Gravity Wave difficulty regulator, getting Belacoin listed on another exchange, and getting Belacoin listed on the Coinomi web wallet (in the integration process now on their end).

After about 3 weeks of beta testing, we have enough info and analytics to start making some big changes to the site. Most of these changes will be made on our own testnet site for Belacam and will be pushed with the launch of Belacam Beta 2.0, set for late May or early June.

Here are some of the changes that will be made:

1) Signup Page
-Removing the fields 'Country', 'Birth Year', 'Gender'
-Only entering the password once
-We will check if the username is taken right after it's been typed, not once the form is submitted

2) Feed/Discover Page
-Combined into one page, similar to scrolling through the homepage of Reddit
-Smarter algorithm for showing posts (currently, we show posts on the discover page in the order they were posted. The new algorithm will take into account the amount of likes the post has, whether you're following the user or not, and the time the photo was posted)

3) User Profile
-Each profile will show lifetime money earned
-Cover Photo
-See users' followers and who the user is following

4) General
-Comments will be likable
-Sending a weekly email to people who have earned money (like "You got paid $3.68 this week on Belacam.com) to keep users engaged and coming back
-Removing "upload page" and integrating the upload form as part of the main feed page
-Showing 24 hour Trending hashtags
-Showing Suggested Users to Follow

With that, the whole site is getting a design makeover. The new site looks much better, and it's the site that will likely carry us through the next few hundred thousand users before we really need to make any more significant design changes.

Please follow the wallet setup instructions at http://Belacoin.org/windowswalletsetup.pdf or use the addnodes from https://novaexchange.com/addnodes/BELA/.

As stated before, we are working on a fix for that. Please keep in mind that what other developers do or don't do has no effect on what we do. Just because other developers didn't fix an issue that was affecting their coin, it does not mean that we can also neglect to address this issue.

There are a lot of exciting things right around the corner. Here are some things planned for the next few weeks:

1) Belacam.com Beta 2.0 (Design Overhaul)
2) Adopt Dark Gravity Wave difficulty regulator (used by Dash)
3) Coinomi Listing
4) Listing on one more altcoin exchange
5) 2nd Belacam Promotional Video

After this, we'll be working to bring some big updates to Belacam. Things like videos, ads (so we can start earning some revenue), chat, and the mobile apps are on our planner for this summer. We're also expanding both The Ambia Fund and the Belacam teams by hiring new people.

Thank you for that. As we said before, we are aware and are working to fix it.


We don't have an official public roadmap, but our team does follow an internal one. If you join our slack at Belacoin.herokuapp.com, you'll hear all about our plans for the next month and beyond. These include changing the mining difficulty regulator from KGW to DGW, listing Belacoin on Coinomi, listing Belacoin on another exchange, and going into Belacam Beta 2.0 with a design overhaul. We will be working on the Belacam mobile app once we have the website all worked out and running 100% smoothly. As you can tell, there are a lot of exciting things on our plate coming in the next few weeks. However, we still can only do one thing at a time.

It's official, Belacoin is coming to the Coinomi web wallet, likely within the next 2-4 weeks. They'll be spending the next few days getting it integrated, and then it should be listed with the next update, whenever that is.