[ANN] [PPC] PPCoin 0.3.0 Release - Upgrade Required

[Sunny King]

Official release build is now available http://www.ppcoin.org/ (via sourceforge)

What's in 0.3.0 release:

• Stake generation protocol upgrade (protocol switch March 20th)
• Qt UI support
• Fix compatibility with vanitygen (note: private keys dumped in v0.2 is no longer importable into v0.3.0, must dump again from v0.3.0 client)
• Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements

The protocol upgrade in 0.3.0 includes a new algorithm to derive proof-of-stake hash modifier, the entity that scrambles computation for stake owners, which replaces the current proof-of-stake difficulty used as modifier in 0.2 protocol. The design was started late September last year, when I first began to realize the issues with using difficulty as modifier. Honorary mention also goes to Jutarul, who independently discovered and verified an issue with using difficulty as modifier and published on bitcointalk in December last year, while successfully executed a demo attack on the block chain. Other changes in the protocol include starting hash weight from 0 at the 30-day mininum age, and requirement that coinstake timestamp must equal block timestamp. Overall 0.3 protocol should significantly strengthen the proof-of-stake protection and resolve the current known vulnerabilities.

Upgrade instructions:

Upgrade is required before Wednesday March 20th. Nodes that have not upgraded before this deadline will disconnect from the main ppcoin network (hard fork).

To upgrade:
1) Before upgrade, you must first backup your wallet:
ppcoind backupwallet <destination_backup_wallet_name>
2) Note down your balance/stake/newmint amounts. Shutdown ppcoin
ppcoind stop
3) Inside your wallet directory, remove all files and subdirectories except for leaving wallet.dat and ppcoin.conf in place.
4) Download 0.3.0 and unpack/install.
5) Start up ppcoind/ppcoin-qt normally.
6) Use getinfo/about to confirm your ppcoind/ppcoin-qt version is now 'v0.3.0ppc-beta'
7) You should see block chain is being downloaded again. Please note during redownload of block chain your balance will be shown initially as 0 and change as block chain is being downloaded. This is expected. When block chain download completes your balance/stake/newmint should return to the same value before the upgrade.

My sincere appreciation to co-contributors of 0.3.0 release:

• Robert VanHazinga of Hartland PC (dreamwatcher) for the vanitygen compatibility fix
• Jutarul for demonstrating stake generation vulnerability
• EskimoBob for reporting issue fixed in 0.3.0

Cheers and have fun!

[FuzzyBear]

Sweet nice work and gtz on the new release am installing now.. will try on Windows 7, XP, Server 2008 and Ubuntu 12.04 so i'll let u know if I have any problems

[12gaFacelift]

up and running on win7

[smoothie]

Okay i still think that not talking about how the algorithm works isn't going to make the boogey man go away.

Can you explain publicly the new POS algorithm?

[Liquid]

QT version ?

[tacotime]

Okay i still think that not talking about how the algorithm works isn't going to make the boogey man go away.

Can you explain publicly the new POS algorithm?

this

[Jutarul]

First of, congrats to the release! I can only imagine how much work has been put into it. Also your acknowledgement is somewhat flattering.

So far there has been a lot of secrecy about the development team and process of ppcoin. This has to be improved if this cryptocurrency shall be here to stay. It is perfectly possible to stay anonymous while performing a transparent development. Up to today you haven't stated a reasoning for your procedure.

If you have any design documents, which lead to the derivation of the 0.3.0 POS implementation please share them with the community. Also it would be great if you could explain HOW exactly the new implementation removes the weaknesses of a computational attack on the POS generation.

Also, please know that I have nothing against opaque development in general as long as the source code is published and can be verified. There are a lot of reasons why developers choose opaque development - the predominated one being lack of time to prepare documentation and engage in algorithmic design discussions.
However, I don't understand why it has to be that way here. Especially network security is a critical topic which benefits from a peer developed process, making the code stronger - not weaker.

Thank you

[Sunny King]

Thanks. Surely you have already touched upon the reasons of what you refer to as 'opaque' development, mostly, due to lack of resources, secondly, for security concerns. I only have time to discuss the design with trusted peers before release. I hope you can understand that there is lot of work involved and it's not trivial work to even understand the design and its intricacies. There is no separate document, I have put some comments into the source code, it's not long at all, only about 400 lines in kernel.cpp and some of it is preexisting code in v0.2. Interested parties can take time to look at it, and discuss it maybe in my disclosure thread. I'll try to answer some of the questions along the way.

[Jutarul]

Thanks. Surely you have already touched upon the reasons of what you refer to as 'opaque' development, mostly, due to lack of resources, secondly, for security concerns. I only have time to discuss the design with trusted peers before release. I hope you can understand that there is lot of work involved and it's not trivial work to even understand the design and its intricacies. There is no separate document, I have put some comments into the source code, it's not long at all, only about 400 lines in kernel.cpp and some of it is preexisting code in v0.2. Interested parties can take time to look at it, and discuss it maybe in my disclosure thread. I'll try to answer some of the questions along the way.

Thanks, that should clear things up. Although I don't quite follow you on "security concerns". It seems that your understanding of cryptology got things backwards - at least from my perspective.

[Sunny King]

Thanks, that should clear things up. Although I don't quite follow you on "security concerns". It seems that your understanding of cryptology got things backwards - at least from my perspective.

Not really, we just have different perspectives. As the maintainer of ppcoin I have obligations to not talk about unfixed vulnerabilities freely. It's a cryptocurrency in production, not just a research project that no investor loss would be involved. If you ask Gavin about his position on this matter he likely would have to tell you the same thing.

[Jutarul]

Thanks, that should clear things up. Although I don't quite follow you on "security concerns". It seems that your understanding of cryptology got things backwards - at least from my perspective.

Not really, we just have different perspectives. As the maintainer of ppcoin I have obligations to not talk about unfixed vulnerabilities freely. It's a cryptocurrency in production, not just a research project that no investor loss would be involved. If you ask Gavin about his position on this matter he likely would have to tell you the same thing.

I agree with the sentiment to keep vulnerabilities confidential which can lead to immediate harm, until a solution is in place. However, suppression of reporting leads to a false sense of security - for the unaware. It would be great to have some sort of alarm in place. But this is an issue not restricted to ppcoin. It's not even restricted to cryptocurrencies or software. It's a general aspect of governance.

[EskimoBob]

....
Upgrade instructions:

Upgrade is required before Wednesday March 20th. Nodes that have not upgraded before this deadline will disconnect from the main ppcoin network (hard fork).

To upgrade:
1) Before upgrade, you must first backup your wallet:
ppcoind backupwallet <destination_backup_wallet_name>
2) Note down your balance/stake/newmint amounts. Shutdown ppcoin
ppcoind stop
3) Inside your wallet directory, remove all files and subdirectories except for leaving wallet.dat and ppcoin.conf in place.
4) Download 0.3.0 and unpack/install.
5) Start up ppcoind/ppcoin-qt normally.
6) Use getinfo/about to confirm your ppcoind/ppcoin-qt version is now 'v0.3.0ppc-beta'
7) You should see block chain is being downloaded again. Please note during redownload of block chain your balance will be shown initially as 0 and change as block chain is being downloaded. This is expected. When block chain download completes your balance/stake/newmint should return to the same value before the upgrade.

My sincere appreciation to co-contributors of 0.3.0 release:

• Robert VanHazinga of Hartland PC (dreamwatcher) for the vanitygen compatibility fix
• Jutarul for demonstrating stake generation vulnerability
• EskimoBob for reporting issue fixed in 0.3.0

Cheers and have fun!

Excellent job ya'll.

"destination" - you actually need to add a destination path
$ ./ppcoind backupwallet /home/destination-dir-here/new_wallet_name.dat

[Milkshake]

Great! Now let's see how long until another vuln is discovered 

[AndyRossy]

Will be updating later on this afternoon =) gj.

[Vitalicus]

Finaly !!!!!
Thanks and for great GUI

[EskimoBob]

upgraded from source. Did not encounter any problems. Good job.
I'll compile ppcoin-qt later.

[dreamwatcher]

I upgraded cryptocoin explorer last night.

Install went smooth, and no issues so far. 

[Sunny King]

Note: if your wallet contains more than a couple thousand transactions, when you are redownloading block chain the Qt UI might appear locked up. This is a known issue due to the heavy-lifting of wallet scanning I believe but it's not really locked up and still doing the work. Just leave it to finish the redownload of block chain, or you can use command line getinfo to check its progress (getinfo response will be slower also in this situation).

If you have really huge/fragmented wallet causing redownload to be really slow, another option might be to redownload block chain with an empty wallet, then stop ppcoin and replace the empty wallet with real wallet backup.

[Gavin Andresen]

If you ask Gavin about his position on this matter he likely would have to tell you the same thing.

... or not.  There's a difference between "unfixed vulnerabilities" and "half-baked design."

I think big decisions that affect the fundamentals of the design should be discussed in the open (see the current Bitcoin debate over raising the block size limit).

[Sunny King]

... or not.  There's a difference between "unfixed vulnerabilities" and "half-baked design."

I think big decisions that affect the fundamentals of the design should be discussed in the open (see the current Bitcoin debate over raising the block size limit).

It's a whole gray area I am not really interested debating about this. You make judgement on bitcoin what should be discussed in the open what needs to be kept under wrap until it's patched, I make my judgement on ppcoin. Meanwhile, let's focus on getting the real work done.