Does anybody have any insight re: what's up with Bitcoin SV?

On the first of August, 2021, the block size was about 450GB.  Since then, it has more than doubled
to over 1160 GB as of the time of writing.  Many of the blocks are over 1GB and some are close to 2GB.
This explosion in size is swamping my ability/willingness to throw endless computing resources
into supporting this otherwise worthless coin.  Nevertheless, I am still curious re: wtf?

IMHO, there is no way this is any kind of organic explosion in new adoption and is instead some
sort of scam/attack.  My guesses are:

1. This bloat comes from a mass of fake and needlessly complicated transactions that are
intended to draw attention to this coin.  For people who don't see the gory details, this explosion
of activity might look like an explosion in new popularity/adoption, so therefore this must be
the _next great coin_ to get involved with.

2. Perhaps this is a denial-of-service attack? Is somebody just generating endless quantities of large and complex transactions in order to bloat the blockchain, push the little people out, and generally wreak chaos and havoc for this poor hapless coin?


It has occurred to me to consult the GrandGoogle about this but all I find is ra-ra apparently
written by the same group of people.  I don't actually find any real documentation or discussion.
Obviously my failing to find this, but hopefully somebody here can clue me in.  Thanks.

I have a node open at 185.183.96.73:19323, but it's stuck at block 2391687 dated 07/21/2019.

I have another node that's behind NAT, but which is connected to 185.183.96.73, but it's stuck at block 2774209 dated 09/14/2020.

Both nodes have peers that are also stuck at or very near these blocks.

So I'm curious if you all have any insight.  Why might 185.183.96.73 not update from the other node?  Why is everybody stuck here?

Ha! I didn't know there was one.  Learn something new everyday :-)

Looks like whoever wrote the official Dockerfile knows more about Docker and Devcoin than I do, but it might be a bit overwhelming for a n00b.

Perhaps a n00b would have an easier time starting with my edition all the while having a handy upgrade path with the official edition.

My 0.02

Hello folks,

If anyone is having issues with the BBQCoin code from https://github.com/olker0, such as the source code doesn't really build or that it might come with questionable motives, please see https://github.com/bostontrader/crypto-docker/tree/master/Legacy/BQC-BBQCoin instead.

This is a Dockerfile that builds the most recent commit (2014-Feb) of the BQC source code from https://github.com/overware/BBQCoin with Ubuntu 16.04 and upnp.  It weighs in at a mere 73 mb, which ain't too bad in today's world.  I would have used later Ubuntu but attempting to do so
causes build woes that I don't have time to debug.

One thing to keep an eye on though.  When you first start bbqcoind, using the up-to-date blockchain, it takes several tens of minutes to do whatever it does upon startup before it really gets going.  In the meantime, no RPC.  So it's not hung, it's just slow.  I think this problem comes from the actual source code, not my build of it.  I look forward to being corrected if proven wrong.

This works well for me and has given me an up-to-date blockchain.  I did however have to jump through hoops to find initial nodes.  But I thing you bbqers can figure that out and once that's accomplished it's easy sailing thereafter.

My humble offering to the ecosystem.  Enjoy!

Hello folks,

For a good time please take a look at https://github.com/bostontrader/crypto-docker/tree/master/Legacy/DVC-Devcoin

This is a Dockerfile that builds a modern commit (2020-Dec) of the DVC source code with Ubuntu 18.04.  It weighs in
at a mere 73 mb, which ain't too bad in today's world.  I would have used Ubuntu 20.04 but attempting to do so
makes building db4.8 much more difficult (cuz it's getting too old!)

This works well for me and easily finds peers and downloads the entire DVC blockchain from scratch if necessary.

My humble offering to the ecosystem.  Enjoy!

I have some observations to add to the OKEx mystery.

In the past my Chinese friend was quite able to jump through the KYC hoops and validate his OKEx account.  https://www.okex.com has been blocked in the Mainland for a long time, but https://www.okex.me was usable as an alternative.  My friend was able to download the Android app for his smartphone and said app has worked just fine.  He could easily trade between crypto and fiat using the OKEx Android app in conjunction with whatever other payment apps he had on his phones.  Up until a few days ago all of this was working just fine, despite the withdrawal default.

Starting near the end of October, 2020, the "sell" feature to "sell" crypto in exchange for fiat stopped working.  Said feature would simply display "no records", both in the Android app and their ordinary web app.  So now he is not only unable to withdraw coins, he's not even able to "sell" the coins to the next bag-holder.

Starting near the start of November 2020, https://www.okex.me went dark.  Not visible from the Mainland and probably not visible anywhere else.

Also starting at that same time was a disturbing glitch in the matrix.  The web app displays the total approximate valuation of the spot trading account, but the detail view breaking this down by coin shows "no records."  The Android app still shows these details as well as the API.

I'm tempted to think that there's a crackdown on Chinese crypto users, but perhaps my limited observations cannot generalize so far.  I'd like to hear if anybody else is able to trade coin for RMB using any other market.

Howdy Andy,

Congrats on your new bithub site. I'm responding to your thread because I'd like to talk to you about bookkeeping.

Yawn... exactly.  Nobody wants to do bookkeeping but if you're doing anything with money, you have to keep track of where it all is, lest some or all of it quickly slithers away to parts unknown.  According to my understanding of bithub you're going to take funds from an end-user, execute a trade on one of several other exchanges, and send the results back to the end-user.  Adjusted for various fees along the way.  From the bookkeeping POV, this conceptually simple thing to do has a remarkable amount of tedious detail buried within.  Oh... yeah... you're also doing multi-currency bookkeeping as well, so that contributes gas to the fire.

But fear not... All is not lost.  I'd like to introduce you to an open-source project called bookwerx.  Bookwerx implements a RESTful API that does multi-currency bookkeeping, using the time-honored double-entry system, slightly modified to accommodate multiple currencies. Bookwerx can record the relevant numbers in your transactions to arbitrary precision w/o round-off issues. With bookwerx your software can create the required transactions, extract transaction histories, and create aggregate summaries such as balance sheets and profit and loss statements.

Bookwerx was inspired by my agonizing efforts to reconcile a myriad of disparate records of crypto transactions.  Said records are frequently scattered randomly all over a website and permeated with round-off errors and blind-spots.  Although none of this is rocket science, dealing with bookkeeping is an enormous distraction from the main goal of implementing your product.  Don't let this nuisance bite you on your ass.

You may also see an online example front-end at http://23.253.160.60.  This example includes some elementary tutorial information as well as an http log of the traffic between the UI and the server.

The source-code for the server can be found at https://github.com/bostontrader/bookwerx-core-rust the same for the UI is at https://github.com/bostontrader/bookwerx-ui-elm

Oh! Starting a new business is child's play.  Just send me 10 BTC today and I _guarantee_ that you'll be a billionaire in 30 days. Hurry! This offer won't last.  Limit of 5 per household.  Problem solved. :-)

IMHO you have to start at the bottom and study general business management skills.  A critical, but frequently overlooked part of this is to learn basic bookkeeping and financial analysis.  Any endeavour you have in mind requires assets (and perhaps) liabilities to start, will certainly consume expenses, and if you have the right balance of smart and lucky might even generate some revenue.  Is this project making a profit? If not, do you have enough cash to feed it until it does?  Even if it _is_ technically turning a profit, what rate of return are you making on your invested capital? Is that enough? These are examples of questions that are generally and basically useful, regardless of whatever business you're in.  I cannot count the times I've heard people excitedly explain some business idea w/o any idea that these questions even exist. 

Any fool can borrow money or torch his hard-earned savings or whatever windfall of cash he's acquired and "start a business."  He can rent office space, hire people, buy hookers 'n' blow and generally be the BOSS until the cash runs out.  Then it's party over time.

Another thing to get all gloomy about that there's something very horribly wrong with money, economy, and politics in today's world. One element of this problem is that there's a vast amount of "money printing" going on.  Not literally "printing" as in the olden days, but the creation of new money ex-nihilio is red-lined and getting worse.  This flood of newly created money flows into the pockets of politically-connected people first, via bank loans.  They can then use this cheap and easy credit to build any fantasy they can imagine.  Said money continues to flow into the economy generally, pushing up the price of productive assets, thereby driving down the rate of return on them.

So now the world is filled with people who literally have more money than they know what to do with.  They cannot find sufficient rate of return.  So they double-down on whatever they're doing now and/or copy what a million other people are already doing.  This gives us vast over-capacity almost everywhere.

Yes, yes... I know... there's nothing we can do about these things but we have to use them anyway.  Well, that's an example of "sucker deal."

If I had an easier answer I'd be doing it myself and not telling folks on the Internet about it :-)

pooya87 said... "businesses only fail when they are run by incompetent people who have no idea how to run and grow a business."

Able management is no guarantee of success.  Businesses are frequently killed by outside forces, regardless of the quality of management.

I feel yer pain dude, but how does complaining about it cure anything?  You have to take action, preferably of the carefully considered rational variety.  Are you in the city? In a rural area?  Can you get to a rural area?  Do you have any relatives in a rural area?  You've lived 1/4 of a century already so you obviously have enough revenue to support your eating habit, so that's _something_, however humble, to get started with.

I agree that paying 8K to some scammer to get you released from military service sounds like a bad idea, so I'd suggest not doing that.  In fact, military service is probably a pretty good choice in your circumstances.  Spend two years learning to bust ass and help defend your country is not the worst possible use of your time.  What does the army do with ex-soldiers?  Abandon them at the bus station?  Surely there's _some_ system of helping you integrate into society.  Also being a member in good standing of the informal network of former soldiers would probably be very useful for you.

Hello Ronin,

I sympathize with your situation and I'd like to weigh in with a few thoughts on the matter.  When I was your age, about 30 years ago, I was in a similar situation.  The world is just a fucked up place no matter where you go and learning how to live in it is difficult.  However, I have some of this figured out so I'd like to share some tips.

1. Whatever your situation is _right now_, just hunker down and learn to tolerate it. Unless you're on fire or drowning _right now_ you don't need to just jump.  Take your time to start thinking about your situation and how to best manage it.

2. Forget about any _get rich quick_ scheme.  There's no such thing.  You _might_ just get real lucky someday, but that's a matter of random chance not personal action.  Anything that purports to be get-rich-quick is at best just a stupid idea, or at worst is a scam.

3. Forget about making your money on the Internet.  The Internet is completely permeated with bullshit and almost nobody is actually making money playing with it.

4. Forget about going to another country.  They are all fucked up and you're just jumping from one sinking ship to the next.  Do the best with what you have now.

5. Going to "school", especially in Europe is a doomed idea.  It merely delays the inevitable.  During your time in school you can fool yourself into thinking you're taking positive action, but you're just wasting your time.  Eventually, school comes to an end, and then what?  You'll still have the original problem of how to live in an insane world but have wasted a few of your irreplaceable years only to discover the true "value" of the "education"  you've received.

6. Man up and learn to face the harsh truths of life.  Women don't want poor men with such uncertain future.  I experienced that myself at your age and millions of other young men all over the world face the same problem.  Deal with it.  How to get women, and whether or not you even want one, is a worthy topic for another conversation.  Before you do that, look up "red pill dating" on youtube.  As a life-boat into Europe, especially avoid this.  European women in today's world are almost 100% toxic and crazy.  You don't need that.

Ok... now that the doom is out of the way, let's consider some positive steps.

1. The absolutely most useful thing you can learn, IMHO, is "general business management."  Think about doing _any_ kind of business on a very small scale.  Some example skills that you can easily learn:

1A.  Learn to think like an entrepreneur.  Everybody you see has things that they want and need.  They also have assets and things they can do or make.  How can you move these things between people and take your cut?  Most people have no clue about this.  An entrepreneur sees 1000 examples of this everywhere he goes.

1B. Learn how to do double-entry bookkeeping.  Even a child with the handful of coins that he's found in his short life has assets.  He likes to buy thing so he has expenses.  If he starts thinking about this at all, he quickly realizes he can harvest money from his mother's purse, so now he has revenue.  Double-entry bookkeeping is a method of organizing this information so that we can understand the finances of our operation and thus make _better decisions_ about it.  This is the foundation for subsequent financial analysis. 

1C. Even on a very small scale, you have to make a profit.  Your revenue should be higher than your expenses.  Is it?  That's the beginning of financial analysis and you can't even know this unless you have bookkeeping records.  After you do this for a while, your pile of money starts to grow.  You can then start thinking about a rate-of-return on your invested capital.  That's more financial analysis.  Some projects are dogs and have a very low (or even negative) rate of return.  Get rid of them.  Some projects have a better rate of return.  Feed them and let them grow bigger.  This is all financial analysis.

2. When you start seeing the world through the pov of an entrepreneur, it really does start looking like a money tree.  Bookkeeping and financial analysis is the beginning toolkit you need to measure your actions and make non-emotional decisions about them.

3. Evaluate get-rich-fast schemes using financial analysis.  You'll invariably find that they are sucker deals.

So apply this advice to a practical example:

Can you find _any_ land that you can use?  Let's say 1000 m2. Will any family or friends just let you use some land for free?  How much would it cost to buy or lease this land?

Next, start thinking like a farmer.  The purpose of this land is to grow valuable things.  What can you do to foster this process?  If you do nothing, even weeds still grow.  That's not real valuable, but it's more than zero because you use this to feed other animals.  Perhaps a goat or some geese will eat it.  But there are 1000 other things you can do with land to build a better and more profitable farm.  Don't look at ignorant and barefoot farmers living in mud as role models.  They are clueless.  There are plenty of examples of intelligent and prosperous farmers who _understand_ the chemistry, biology, physics, economics, and politics of farming.  This is how you can gain a foothold in the world and begin the slow crawl up the mountain.

One last bit of advice about women... Imagine trying to catch a cat by chasing cats.  Good luck with that! Even if you get lucky and corner one, you'll just have a miserable time while they scratch out your eyes. Instead, ignore the cats.  Do your own thing.  Doing so will most likely give rise to a situation that cats enjoy.  Eventually, the cats become curious and come to you.  Soon you'll have so many cats that they become a nuisance! :-)

Good luck with your search for prosperity in an insane world.

Howdy Folks,

One particularly nettle-some issue of various exchanges that we have encountered centers around the issue of dealing with numerical precision.

This issue has at least four main conspirators:

1. Ordinary round-off issues.  As you're probably aware, when calculating the actual quantities of the coins involved in a trade you're likely going to encounter the need to do some rounding.  For example, if the price of a trading pair is 3 Coin A / Coin B, and you have 1 Coin  A, you can buy a whopping 0.33333333333333333333.... coin B. 

2. How do you display it? How many decimal points shall we display?  This gives us a 2nd level of fun-with-rounding because whatever rounding we've done prior may need to get rounded again to fit the display.  Or perhaps we've rounded too aggressively prior and now the display shows a lot of trailing zeros after a now merely wrong number.

3. How do you control the propagation of round-off error throughout your system?  You're constantly calculating prices, adding transaction amounts together, and trying to present the information on reports.  There are many places for rounding issues to seep into this.

4. How do you represent these numbers internally?  Are you going to use Integers? Floats? Strings? Tally sticks?  Some other fundamentally better method?

All of this is a giant nuisance and distraction from the main goal of doing whatever else you're doing with software.  Whenever you see bookkeeping numbers displayed in anybody's software, they've had to grapple with these issues, with whatever degree of success they've had.

My purpose in this post is not to gloat over their discomfort.  Instead, I'd like to explain how bookwerx deals with these issues.

The party starts with internal representation.  I'll spare you the gory details about why Ints, Floats, Strings, and Tally sticks are not sufficient for this job.  Instead, I'll assert that bookwerx gets this done by using two integers to store every number.  These integers are called the significand and the exponent and they work very similarly to scientific notation.  For example, the tuple (70000523, -7) really does a completely adequate job of representing exactly 7.0000523.

In this system we still have the issue of MAXINT to be wary of.  But that's a headache for developers and is of no concern to the end-user, who never sees these numbers in this form anyway. In actual practice, integer MAXINT is high enough to accommodate the actual numbers in real use.  For example: a mere 41 bit int would be enough to describe 10000.00000001 of some coin.  If you're dealing with that many BTC for example, you'll probably be able to get bigger Ints.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what could be done with 53, 64, and 128 bit Ints.

Internal representation is merely the first step.  Next, one must have a standard for rounding when doing multiplication and division.  Using my prior examples again, If the price of BBBAAA is exactly 3, and I have 7.0000523 AAA, I can buy 2.333350766666666....  BBB.  The bookwerx system can't represent that number directly and so you'll need to round to some power of 10.  How about round it to 8 decimal places as is frequently done?  Hence the result is 2.33335077, which bookwerx can easily represent as (233335077, -8)

Regarding the issue of propagation of error, there is very little of this in bookwerx.  The numbers are stored internally in an exact format.  They can easily be added and subtracted with zero loss and that's all bookwerx cares about.  Problem solved.  Other people might want to perform other numerical operations on these numbers, and they'll need to figure out how to convert between this internal representation and whatever representation they use and how to control their own error propagation.  But that's outside of bookwerx'  job description.

Finally, we return to the issue of display.  Suppose our result is 2/3.  We round this to 8 decimal places and get 0.66666667.  This of course involves a one-time burst of error, but we can tolerate that and we can easily represent this internally as (66666667, -8).  Later, we want to display this rounded to 3 decimal places (because that's the sort of thing that people do.)  Shall we just truncate and display 0.666? Shall we round again giving us (667,-3) internally and then display 0.667 ?  So many things to fret about!  Even after you bang your fist on the table and order the resolutions of these tedious details, you now have a new problem.  Your end-user thinks he has 0.66666667 Quatloos,  but only sees 0.667 in his account summary.  Worse, he sees 0.6666 in some other transaction listing, so your system is internally inconsistent.

Eye-oh!  How about dump the above and try plan B?

How about give the user control over the quantity of decimal places to display and provide some visual feedback regarding hidden-loss-of-precision-due-to-the-rounding-of-the-display?  The underlying data is never touched and the reports round as necessary but let the users know that there are details omitted.  Finally, because all of the reports are drawing from the One Source of Truth in a consistent manner, all of the reports are internally consistent.

I have attached some screenshots to illustrate:

Start with some transactions with the display limited to 5 decimal places:



By clicking on the suitable control, the user can easily round to 4 decimal places.  But now we have some red to indicate the existence of hidden detail:



By continuing this process the user can further limit the display  as desired:






But wait... there's more!  Why stop at zero?  Do billionaires look at the 10^1 or 10^2 power of their finances?  I wouldn't!  Let's keep limiting the display even more...

Howdy Jerome,


Those services look pretty good.   How is bookwerx different?  Glad you asked!

1. bookwerx is not a similar service.  We have an online example to look at http://23.253.160.60/, but are not soliciting users for it as a service.

2. bookwerx is open source and it's meant for people who need to have greater control over what it does and how its installed.  It's a foundation for more sophisticated reporting/analysis that somebody might want.

3. bookwerx does not connect the dots of your entire crypto-empire via a single account with any online service.  I don't have any specific issues with the particular services you mentioned, but, charitably speaking, CloudWorld has not exactly demonstrated much trustworthiness or integrity to date.

4. bookwerx maintains your data locally where you can keep a close eye on it.

5. bookwerx let's you enter any transactions you want, not just whatever is offered by the other services you mentioned.  So for example, crypto-trading is part of one's larger financial environment and some folks want financial reporting that incorporates everything they do, not just the crypto-part.

Thanks for your interest.  Hope this clarifies.

I'd like to suggest that you take a look at bookwerx. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5197686.0

The foundation of any financial analysis starts with proper bookkeeping of the underlying transactions. There is a tried-n-true method literally a mere few centuries old, called double-entry bookkeeping (the debits and credits thingy) that does this. The various crypto sites that I've ever seen apparently view bookkeeping as a nuisance that distracts them from their primary goal.  So whatever balance inquiry/transaction history/financial analyses features they offer are at best random fragments of information.

With bookwerx you can define the currencies and accounts that you use and then enter transactions using the double-entry bookkeeping system.  The advantage of doing this is that said model just happens to align well with the reality of recording financial transactions.  If you study this, you will find that you can record the information about accounts that you need, and then later retrieve useful information such as balances, profits-n-losses, and transaction history.

As a learning exercise I encourage you to try this with spreadsheets and/or home-grown methods.  You'll quickly discover that there are some nettle-some issues in this seemingly simple task that will quickly choke lesser methods.

Another common woe with any crypto market that I've ever seen is their confusion with round-off error.  Sure, price x quantity will frequently give us some round-off error initially.  But once the actual amounts are determined, we want to accurately record all of these f**kin decimal places.  We later want to see all of this in any subsequent reporting.  Even if we want to view fewer decimal places in the UI, we still want some indication that hidden details exist, but are merely suppressed at the moment.  Bookwerx eats this for breakfast.

Bookwerx is implemented as a Restful API.  You GET, POST, PUT, 'n' DELETE what you need to in order to CRUD all the objet d'bookkeeping that are relevant for your use, as well as to extract balance and profit-n-loss info from the resulting collection of information.

Although the API is a great way for your automated processes to interface with bookkwerx, it's not good for human beans.  So bookwerx also includes an example UI at http://23.253.160.60/, that uses the API to do the dirty work.

Good luck with your search for solutions and I encourage you to give bookkwerx a consideration.

Tracking the P&L of an open position, especially anything remotely complicated, would be real easy to do with this API.

One particularly nettle-some issue that I frequently see is that customer balance information on exchanges is usually pretty bad. It's frequently divided into several different sections and we have to transfer funds from one section to another.  I've seen markets where these exchanges are just not listed.  Whatever balances are displayed are mere assertions w/o any list of transactions to support their derivation.  Even if the exchange offers a transaction history, it's frequently just that... a list of transactions of all the different currencies w/o any running total.  Or perhaps there _is_ a running total, but it's out of sequence with the actual transactions, said ordering changing indeterministially! All of this makes reconciliation with external records extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Speaking of reconciliation... even if an exchange _really does_ have good records, the trader needs his own internal records to compare against.  So many people have to keep re-inventing this wheel.  Hopefully bookwerx can save 'em all some trouble :-)

Hello Folks,

One element of trading that's particularly nettle-some is doing bookkeeping.  Believe it or not, many people simply ignore the issue and don't even bother.  Many people try to cobble together spreadsheets and enter transactions by hand.  Neither of these choices are particularly scaleable.  I for one would hate to unleash the TraderBot and then try to follow behind entering transactions by hand in its wake. But creating stronger software that does a better job, is, as with most things computing, easier said than done.

But fear not. All is not lost.  That light in the tunnel is not really an on-rushing train.  I'd like to announce the bookwerx multi-currency, client-server, bookkeeping system.  This is a simple and easy to get started with, open source project, complete with functioning public API.  Take it for a spin around the block, and if it seems useful to you, it's easy enough to setup your own private installation.

bookwerx-core-rust (https://github.com/bostontrader/bookwerx-core-rust) Is the meat and potatoes of bookwerx.  This is a server, written in Rust, that implements an API for doing bookkeeping.  With this API you can define the currencies and accounts that you wish to use, create suitable transactions, observe aggregate phenomenon via reporting tools, and hunt down nettle-some bits o' lint with the linter.

bookwerx-ui-elm (https://github.com/bostontrader/bookwerx-ui-elm) Is an example user interface the enables the user to manually do bookkeeping.  An important benefit of this help the user understand the bookwerx-core-rust API.  With this app the user can observe the http traffic between the UI and the server.  In this way perhaps insight can be had.


Public Demonstration Server

We have a public demonstration server available at http://23.253.160.60.  This will serve bookwerx-ui-elm.  So it's easy enough to get your feet wet with manual bookkeeping, learn the server's API by observing the http traffic to and fro, and eventually graduate to an automated connection to the server, using the API.

Hey sigHash,

I'd like to send you a private message about this project but apparently your settings are such that you don't accept PMs from n00bs.  I hereby request that you lift this constraint long enough for me to send my message.  Thanks!

Hello Folks,

We hereby announce the bookwerx multi-currency, client-server, bookkeeping system.

bookwerx-core-rust (https://github.com/bostontrader/bookwerx-core-rust) Is the meat and potatoes of bookwerx.  This is a server, written in Rust, that implements an API for doing bookkeeping.  With this API you can define the currencies and accounts that you wish to use, create suitable transactions, observe aggregate phenomenon via reporting tools, and hunt down nettle-some bits o' lint with the linter.

bookwerx-ui-elm (https://github.com/bostontrader/bookwerx-ui-elm) Is an example user interface, the primary purpose of which is to help the user understand the bookwerx-core-rust API.  With this app the user can observe the http traffic between the UI and the server.  In this way perhaps insight can be had.


Public Demonstration Server

We have a public demonstration server available at http://23.253.160.60.  This will serve bookwerx-ui-elm.  From there, work the app, observe the http traffic with the server, and gain personal edification.


Why?

As you might have experienced, doing bookkeeping for your crypto-empire is considered by some authorities to be the most tedious and boring thing there is.  Typing this stuff into your spreadsheet by hand is absurdly labor-intensive and error-prone.  But building stronger software to manage this better is a monstrous distraction from your primary goal of global conquest. Although none of this task is particularly rocket sciency, the individual pieces of it work well together to collectively put up quite a defence.  Instead of wasting your time reinventing this wheel, why not let bookwerx do the dirty work for you?

Consider your own personal experience with mining pools and crypto-exchanges.  As a user I want to know what my balances are.  I want to be able to see all the transactions that created said balances and I'd like to see running totals to assist in debuggery.  I do not want to see random fragments of this information scattered all over the website, complete with blind-spots, nor do I want to see numbers asserted as correct without any derivation, or lists of transactions with many currencies mixed together and no running totals.

Use cases:

• I'm doing automated trading.  Where are all my coins _right now_ ?
• My mining pool creates a blizzard of transactions.  My users want to know what they have earned, what they have received, and how much they are due now.  I want a managerial accounting overview of the entire process.
• My MtGox killer crypto-exchange is almost ready to go. The setting sun reminds me that it's time to strap on a hastily built bookkeeping system, just in time for tomorrow morning's debut.  My market supports 500 different coins and my customer funds are divided into 8 different locations.  Those pesky customers want to know and verify all their balances.   For extra credit: Realize that users of valuable coins don't like round-off error and that it annoys them to wonder if the discrepancies that are ubiquitous in my market's UI vs the customer's internal records are ordinary errors, round-off errors, theft, merely round-off-for-display issues or perhaps some new form of hitherto-now unknown form of dumfoolery.

Multi-Currenciarity

What exactly do this mean?  In conventional bookkeeping the sum of the Debits of a transaction should equal the sum of the Credits.  Bookwerx merely drops that constraint.  The actual software plumbing of creating accounts, transactions, etc, remains essentially the same.

The DR=CR constraint in conventional bookkeeping works just fine when dealing with a single currency.  The value in doing this is that a handful of conditions hold true such as Assets = Liabilities + Equity, or that Net Income = Revenue - Expenses.  It also serves as a simple error detection scheme when creating transactions.  However, the conventional system requires unpleasant contortions to try to squeeze in other currencies.  It's bad enough when you try to work with just a few multi-currency transactions, but the scheme completely disintegrates when you push harder.

bookwerx simply drops this constraint.  The sun still rises by command of the rooster.

With our new found freedom we can create transactions such as:

DR   Cash in Mattress   500      Quatloos
CR   Bank of Mises      15      General Atomic Shekles

What does this mean?  By inspection it looks like a currency exchange and a bank withdrawal.  The quantity of value withdrawn from the bank really does equal the quantity stuffed into the mattress, even if the actual numbers and units are different.

The loss of DR=CR as an error detection scheme for transactions is a minor price to pay.  Fortunately, other error detection mechanisms exist, such as reconcile your balances.

The biggest issues comes from wrapping our heads around the meaning of financial reporting.  Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss Statements work as usual, but it's not at all obvious how to "compare" things.

For example:


Assets:                   Dec 31, 2019      Dec 31, 2018
    Cash in Mattress           500 QTL           200 QTL
    Bank of Mises              250 GAS           550 GAS
                           -------           -------
                  subtotal                    

Liabilities:
    Wecheatembad Credit Corp   500 BTC           150 BTC

Equity
    Owner's Equity           10000 CNY         10000 CNY   


In this example, assets really do still equal the sum of liabilities and equity, even if there's an exchange rate issue to befuddle the analysis.  Is the 2019 BS "better" than the 2018 edition?

The bottom line here is that the actual plumbing of bookkeeping does not require the DR=CR constraint and it works just fine without.  However the analysis of the meaning of transactions and reports is a topic beyond the scope of mere bookkeeping.  This distinction is hidden when only using a single currency, but is unfortunately not magically solved with bookwerx 1.0

But while you ponder the meaning of these deep questions, you'll still want to know the actual bookkeeping details of these things on a day-to-day basis.

In order to answer my prior mystery...

I don't understand wtf is going on 100% but I've found a few clues...

The bitcoindiamondd client is running inside a docker container.  I have discovered that:

given no other iptable forwarding rules...

iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT makes everything work

- and -

iptables -P FORWARD DROP makes everything not work

So it looks like some forwarding is going on, and I'm going to guess that this has something to do with directing traffic to the docker container.

Now that I've got this figured out, I'm 100% synced :-)

Hello Folks,

I'm trying to sync the blockchain.  I'm using the 1.2 client.  All was working just great until block 483150 and now it's completely stuck.  getpeerinfo=[].

Any clues would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Hello Folks,

I have just updated the crypto-docker project at https://github.com/bostontrader/crypto-docker.  Among other things, fans of of FRC might be interested in the following:

With crypto-docker you can build docker images that contain the FRC binaries built from a recent commit of https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin using Alpine Linux.

You can choose to build an image without debug symbols, but with optimization, resulting in a rather small image of about 181 MB.  This is built with QT5 and can be viewed from a VNC viewer on the host system.

Or you can choose to build an image with debug symbols and no optimization, resulting in a larger image.  But this image includes gdb and gdbgui which enables you to debug the executables using gdb and a GUI.

Enjoy!