Yes essentially a smart contract is implemented as a sidechain outputting verifiable state transformation of a locked capital pool. You can do many things with it

I am going to be sharing a new whitepaper soon. Ultimately I see Bamboo as layer-1 of an entirely new ecosystem of apps that are all extensions of the core Bamboo blockchain. The next step will be introducing what I call "programs", programs are new blockchains which represent locked capital on layer-1... these chains execute on their own over the locked capital pool and can implement any verifiable program using something called zero-knowledge proofs. At the core this is very similar to a smart contract, except all smart contracts will be required to be verifiable in bamboo... there is nothing analagous to the EVM in ethereum where code actually runs on Layer 1.

At present I am diving very deeply into how to compile programs written in C to an architecture known as TinyRAM using a project called pequin:
https://github.com/pepper-project/pequin

The core of my vision is that these verifiable programs should be very easy to write and compile... which is currently not the case. More to share later.

We are now listed on TradeOgre! 

Check it out:
https://tradeogre.com/exchange/BTC-BMB

Quick announcement: Members of our dev team are working on adding web miner (WASM) support to ShifuPool. This is a really exciting development You will soon be able to mine directly on the web!

We are now tradable on Exbitron!

https://www.exbitron.com/trading/bmbusdt

PUFFERFISH2 algorithm has now been released to live node. @Decrypted and @CoinfuMasterShifu have run pool and miner against testnet and everythinig appears to be functional. The switchover will happen at block 124,500 with the first pufferfish mined block being 124,501.

@Decrypted will be releasing an updated miner that will be necessary to continue mining bamboo past block 124,500. Will post to this thread to give the update once miner is released.

As mentioned we are now the first cryptocurrency to run a full node in browser over WebRTC.

This is pretty big leap -- a big barrier to entry to running nodes is the network setup -- the requirement that one have an externally accessible IP address -- Bamboo no longer requires this. Our vision is to have hundreds of thousands of nodes as literally anyone that has a browser can now host an ephemeral node, no externally accessible IP required.

You can try it out on chrome now at:
https://mrpandabear.org

We are about to release some very cool updates. Our node server is being ported to run in WebAssembly using the emscripten SDK. This will enable anyone to host a bamboo node simply by opening a tab in their browser. We believe this is the first time any cryptocurrency has had this capability and it will allow our network of nodes to grow much faster -- no download or complicated server configuration necessary

I've updated the link in the main post -- seems it was expiired : https://discord.gg/2m9m2cnBk7

If you post in the discord we will help you get it running!

We've launched pool mining and GPU miner. Together these improvements have yielded hash rates up to 175+ GHashes/sec

We're launching a new program to expand the reach of the network: Node operators are offered 50BMB monthly (there is a small staking fee to ensure quality node operation) The goal is to reach 100 nodes by mid-May. Message us on discord if you're interested!

https://discord.gg/H7CMnXrY

Whitepaper now available here:
 https://www.dropbox.com/s/lctbgrhv53vcpla/Bamboo-Whitepaper.pdf?dl=1

Website coming soon!

We had another attack on the network and the chain was forked. Miners lost blocks between 18K and ~34K.

This was a very complex attack and nearly 3M BMB were stolen by attackers in total. The stolen funds have been recovered and placed in a community account.

Details on the origins of the attack and it's mitigation are available in this post-mortem:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/12b8js0kvfvtv79/Bamboo_Attack_Post-Mortem.pdf?dl=1

We had another attack on the network and the chain was forked. Miners lost blocks between 18K and ~34K.

This was a very complex attack and nearly 3M BMB were stolen by attackers in total. The stolen funds have been recovered and placed in a community account.

Details on the origins of the attack and it's mitigation are available in this post-mortem:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/12b8js0kvfvtv79/Bamboo_Attack_Post-Mortem.pdf?dl=1

Quick update:

Yesterday the network had a breach where an issue with the public key to wallet verification enabled somone to steal and re-sell 800K BMB.

The patch for this issue was simple, and the cost of not having the patch catastrophic (it enabled anyone to steal funds with a simple tampering of transaction data because the signature attached to a transaction was not checked against the withdrawing wallet to ensure they were both from the same private key).

Luckily the funds were returned by the buyer.

You can see the patch here:
https://github.com/mr-pandabear/bamboo/commit/e8336611c3f4add703e925d65c581dfc516cc0bd#diff-bb0926cbaf68b7b7f85dbfae0e096e891684164d8b0602fac0cc3ebbccb1885aR122


The network has now been patched and is functioning as normal.

Okay, got rid of the lambdas and added tests for the totalWork computation.

PR ready for handling network serialization/deserialization properly:
https://github.com/mr-pandabear/bamboo/pull/36/files

This diff would be especially helpful to get feedback:
https://github.com/mr-pandabear/bamboo/pull/36/files#diff-77098f03ea93c1f33e959abf1779714cbf9ac364d993ef4f91877a6168ef5540

That is a really interesting proposition, sent you a DM (let me know if you received it)

You have a good eye.  I think in addition to implementing the pool a deeper code review of, blockchain.cpp, executor.cpp, header_chain.cpp and node synchronization logic from you would also be helpful to make sure the project is as stable as possible as we start to throw more nodes and hash rate at it.

The real vision of this project is to have the most lightweight and minimal production grade blockchain codebase out there that is as simple to understand as possible and is very good at one thing: transactions between person A and B. No frills or fat. I'm slowly getting there but the more help from knowledgeable people the better.

Also: Regarding the cross platform portability of structs / memory alignment issues you pointed out earlier -- what do you think is the best fix? Something like protocol buffers or MessagePack?

EDIT:
For further transparency, I have also found a copy of the chain that happened prior to the first fork (blocks 1 - 7750):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XrlbXUlNISf_x04wYiV3FYMr2gKi7NH5/view?usp=sharing

I re-wrote a much simpler Merkle hash computation here:
https://github.com/mr-pandabear/bamboo/blob/b2dd0f392f3be3b2db861bc450268ae88135d987/src/core/merkle_tree.cpp

So the problem we will introduce by creating a new Merkle calculation is that we will now have two hashing schemes and need to handle validating each one differently based on block number. This is a little bit ugly. I wonder how bad the construction I had earlier is in terms of the length of the proofs it would generate. If it's not that bad my inclination is to just leave it and we will have slightly non-standard Merkle proofs.

3. Yeah, I'll make a note to rename this in the codebase. The set<string> nonce was there to originally implement a per block nonce (in fact there was no TXDB in the original version and transactions were only accepted with a particular blockID to ensure that they could not be repeated in future blocks... this design was very cumbersome as you'd have to discard and re-submit transactions if they didn't make it into a particular block. A 5 character nonce string was used to ensure a lack of repeats within a given block but removed with the introduction of the txdb). TXDB was introduced in this commit:
https://github.com/mr-pandabear/bamboo/commit/b2c09d315bdc2acb5f817755df10391f61f0cdc0#diff-70e9ec68696d98d3955ce2a5ba9954596b47e14c812d2b13ee724a2529a0a5e7

4. Yes they worked like a charm I used https://unstoppableswap.net/

5. My plan is to correct for the larger 6.6M but not the 268.1507 ... yes agree that the 6.6M coins were minted

6. Makes sense, will make a note to put announcements here as well. Speaking of which we released a Windows light wallet:
https://github.com/mr-pandabear/bamboo-wallet/releases/tag/v0.0.1-alpha

7. See 3.

8. I didn't feel fully confident in the Merkle tree implementation and had an itch I'd get it wrong. Luckily it seems the bug you point out just prevents verification in log(TX count) hashes ... but is enough to prevent tampering with block contents (I think?). The ideal would be to use a good open source implementation. I'll probably swap it out.

1. Yes, some sloppiness here.
2. Self addressed transactions are not a problem ... they just equate to a no-op. Ofc, there is the potential for an attacker to flood the system with self-addressed transactions or zero-valued transactions. This edge case should be handled.

 The negative -1 transaction you showed is the one that caused a faulty tx of sz 2^64 that I ignored during the fork. The ledger was never updated but the block was not rejected so it was a bug :/

3. Two transactions with exact same contents cannot be executed twice ... you can think of timestamp as a nonce parameter. if I want to send 2BMB twice to same recepient the signature and hash of transaction is the same unless I change the timestamp.

4. I think I used this or something similar to get Monero first time.

5. I am still not sure if I really want to mess with it. I think the cleanest solution is just to mint an additional 6.6M coins and leave it at that.

6.  I'm not so worried about Discord at the moment. BMB makes lesser claims to anonymity than something like Monero... our security guarantees are not much more than what Bitcoin offers. I agree though that if the coin gains value (which we all hope it does) ... then it will be important for those with large holdings such as early miners to remain anonymous lest they become targets for attackers. Nice catch on the repo image... yeah it was cached on my machine and I made the website repo private it broke