Spreadcoin Project Weekly Update #17th August 2015Improving CommunicationsFollowing some fair feedback from the community, the Spreadcoin team acknowledge that community engagement hasn’t been strong enough recently. To improve communications we aim to publish a weekly update every Friday. These updates may be long or short depending on what there is to say. After a discussion in the development channel on Slack, the team agreed that the updates should meet the following standards:
• The updates will use the least amount of developer time possible.
• The updates will be non-promotional in nature.
• The updates will be factual and open. If there is no progress or a problem, we will say so.
Project Objectives – A Brief History of SpreadcoinAs many of you know, Spreadcoin was originally intended as a fork and rival of Darkcoin. When the original Lead Dev walked away from the project, Spreadcoin was just about to begin the second round of masternode testing. A dedicated core of Spreadcoin supporters started to look at the code in more detail and began to realise that Spreadcoin had much greater potential than simply trying to mimic the functionality that Darkcoin/Dashpay already provided.
After several months of furious Slack activity a new fundamental approach was agreed. Spreadcoin, using a two tier network with Service Nodes, can be used to provide a huge variety of decentralised applications and services whilst rewarding the owners of Service Nodes for doing so.
It was agreed that the first service to be provided by Spreadcoin Service Nodes would be PoBN or Proof of Bitcoin Node. PoBN is simply a mechanism to help the Bitcoin network combat the declining number of full Bitcoin Nodes by financially incentivising Service Node owners to also run full Bitcoin Nodes. What better way to start your project than to offer some support to your mothership? The next service has not been agreed but the many options range from file sharing applications to decentralised altcoin exchange.
What Have the Dev Team Been Doing Since Relaunch?Over the last few months Georgem and Chaositec have had a mammoth challenge to tackle. Whilst Spreadcoin was originally a Darkcoin fork, large amounts of code had been rewritten by the original lead developer. This included a total re-write of the masternode code. It is vital that the new dev team gain an understanding of what is in the code and why it is there.
The crypto community has seen several Darkcoin/Dash copy and paste clones come and go over the last few months but the Spreadcoin project will not sacrifice quality for pace. Nothing will be released until the project team are satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the code is stable and appropriate.
Every day has thrown up surprises in how the code works. A fact that astounded me personally is that Spreadcoind conducts five million operations in the first 10 seconds of execution. Understanding your product is necessary before release, even into testnet.
The focus over the past few months and for the near term future will continue to be reviewing, understanding and improving the fundamentals that are already there. Spreadcoin is doing something that nobody else has done before and the intention is to do it properly.
Dev Team Activity This WeekThe dev team have been working on a tool to assist with the analysis of the operation and efficiency of Spreadcoin. This tool has the ability to capture the literally millions of things that happen when Spreadcoin is running but also gives the ability to filter spurious information and to help identify algorithmic solutions to problems. This tool is taking a lot of dev time at the moment but is expected to pay dividends in the near future as it will allow the dev team to simulate scenarios and code changes which we believe will speed up the testnet process and main net launch of Service Nodes and PoBN.
The new tool helped Georgem spot this bug on August 5th
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1045373.msg12063817#msg12063817.Progress on Testnet & Updated Roadmap.As of today, it looks like the first implementation of Service Nodes in testnet will be empty Service Nodes that are limited in their number by coinsupply/2880.
Whilst some members of the dev team have been testing and investigating the interaction between Spreadcoin Nodes and Bitcoin Full Nodes on the same VPS instance, the community must understand that the path to our first functioning service will be taken in small steps. However it is important to stress that each step will help trigger the next step at an increasing pace.
When Service Nodes are ready for testnet we will depend on the community for help with testing. We are excited for when that process can begin.
A new roadmap will be included with next week’s update to give an indication of our current view of the steps and timescales involved.
Other Activities of InterestCoins101 and others have put a lot of work into a thorough whitepaper and press release that gives full details on our plans for PoBN. This whitepaper has been reviewed by the dev team and the SPR community and has now been sent to a wide range of peers including current and past members of the Bitcoin foundation for comment. We expect to release the whitepaper (version 1.0) within the next two weeks.
Chaositec has announced the Beta of his new mining pool which will soon have Spreadcoin payouts. Chaositec is currently somewhere in the North Sea so expect to hear news from him when he’s back in the world of the internet.
Coins101 has proposed a competition to use vanitygen to find a Spreadcoin address beginning with SatoshiNakamoto. The proposal is open to community debate. Please express your view if you have one!
Questions from the CommunityFuture editions of the weekly update will have a summary of questions asked by the community in the previous week. I will also collate the questions for the purpose of creating a FAQ in due course.
And finally…Apologies for the verbosity of this update! We feel that it was important to make the first one comprehensive. Questions and criticisms are welcome, either on BCT or by PM to Stonehedge. Expect a shorter update with more from the dev team, none of the history and an updated roadmap next week.
-Stonehedge
