This is almost correct, gubiq is on 1.5.12 which is
3 months old now. This is a core value of UBQ to not implement new upgrades unless they are security related, or they have been in-the-wild on Ethereums chain for a long enough period of time to get vetted/tested in a real world system. This is part of the "UBQ is designed to be a stable platform" goal.
"not implement new upgrades unless they are security related" yea right.
If the OP had read the latest quarterly report, they would have seen that upgrades are being made to bring gubiq in line with the latest geth release. This should be done within a month or so if I had to guess, as somewhat recently one of the devs posted the longggg list of merge conflicts which need to be reconciled to complete the upgrade.
Development work is done inside either a development branch or in a private repo, and then changes are merged with the working branch. That's why it can appear as though work isn't being done on the core node software.
So then where is it?
The swap from Ethereum's difficulty re-adjustment algo was originally to Digibyte's Digishield algo. This was never hidden, they were given full credit for it. However, during launch week the Digishield algo was having a very difficult time keeping block times consistent with the 88 second block time specification. It was leading to very long or very short blocks, and massive swings in difficulty which were causing problems for the miners and the network overall.
Digishield was modified to include a difficulty retargeting "window" type mechanism. This modified algorithm is called Flux.
so they upgraded a couple variables and gave it a new name.
- I'll correct my monetary policy critique they added some if/elses based on block height truly revolutionary stuff
I'm happy to see they tried walking their original statement back here. Ethereum uses a constant 5 ETH reward for every block until the end of eternity, or until they switch to PoS. That's fine but it results in a lot of inflation forever. I haven't seen any info on proposed PoS rewards, so they may be addressing this. This isn't a "bad" thing per-se, but UBQ decided to implement a more traditional inflation schedule which is defined up front. So it starts at 8 UBQ per block and reduces down to 1 UBQ per block, lowering by 1 UBQ per block per year. In about 5 months it will reduce from 8 to 7 per block, for example.
Well that is very revolutionary indeed.
The post linked even says this was just a low volume day. It was not uncommon for coins during this time period to have low volume. We were coming out of the tail end of a multi-year bear market almost across the board. Conditions have changed now and volume across the board for legitimate projects has come up nicely.
It was always a low volume day because it was a dead coin that they cornered.
I guess it depends on people's definitions of "premine". Premine is typically defined as coins which are mined/allocated up-front and given to the developers or to a "foundation" depending on how it's set up. In this case the coins were pre-allocated to users who signed up using a google form and signed a message with their old JBS private keys. These signatures combined with a snapshot of the blockchain were used to pre-allocate coins to users based on how much they held at the time of swap. This is all explained in the nucleus transparency report for those interested in learning more about the process:
https://medium.com/the-ubiq-report/nucleus-transparency-report-6496e444bd85You are trying to move the goalpost. A premine is and has always been coins allocated up front.
Also explained in the transparency report, these funds are NOT for the devs. The funds are locked in a multisig wallet and the only transfers made out of that wallet are for folks who find older JBS wallets and submit a new claim for the swap. This was done to prevent users from getting left out of the swap in the event they were hospitalized, on vacation, or otherwise didn't pay attention to or forgot about the swap.
Do you honestly think they didnt own the majority of the jumbucks they traded in? You would be a damn fool if you believed that.
Other stuff:
"...and the only ubiq dev works for bittrex fulltime."
Yep, one of the developers works for Bittrex. I don't see why this is considered a negative. The work they do for Bittrex in no way benefits UBQ, and considering Bittrex is as legally compliant as they are with the SEC and other regulators, would you expect them to allow a conflict of interest to form and expose them to legal liability? If anything it means that one of the Ubiq developers is of high enough caliber that Bittrex deemed them a worthy hire.
There are 2 primary developers who work on UBQ full time. There are 2 other developers who work on other projects related to UBQ (such as the Signum hardware), but these two developers don't get too involved with the wallet software. Then there are other members who help out with community, moderation, public outreach, marketing, etc...
As with any open source software project such as Ubiq, any developer can choose to create issues and/or pull requests and supplement development. There have been multiple, smaller, contributions from community members.
So no actual devs got it.
Hopefully that helps to clear it up!
yea sure did.