Monero MissivesAugust 16th, 2014Hello, and welcome to our eleventh Monero Missive!
Major Updates1. We know everyone is quite keen to play around with the GUI. We are still doing a great deal of underlying work, but we wanted to get the interface out there for everyone to have a play and see how they like it. There are some bugs (for example, resizing the MiniWindow interface does not work), and there are some spelling errors that we'll fix as we pull everything out for Qt Linguist to handle translation. But if you're happy to play around then please grab a binary - we'll take feedback in the form of github issues as soon as we've finalised the initial release of the interface and have it up there. You can download the interface binary for
Windows or
Mac. We'll also push a Linux build out in the next day or two once it is confirmed as all working!
2. Our
/r/monero sub-reddit broke 600 subscribers! If you are a Redditor and you aren't subscribed, now would be a very excellent time to do so! And whilst you're sorting out your social media, why not make a turn at
our Facebook Page and click the "Like" button, and then swing past our
Twitter and make sure you're following us:)
3. We are always quite hesitant when it comes to discussing donations, but they have been quite thin, which does make our job that much more difficult. With our increased download and testing equipment costs, we are spread quite thin. But fear not, within the next week or two we are going to have a way you can donate to the ongoing development of Monero whilst still getting something directly. In the interim, please do not forget that the donation addresses are in the OP, and that it is your ongoing support that is helping us plough ahead with development!
4. In case you haven't watched the #Monero-Dev Fireside Chat, we'd like to take a moment to discuss an upcoming terminology change. To take it from the github issue that has been at the centre of the discussion: It's been suggested that "wallet" is a poor description for laymen, and may hinder adoption. It's also arguably sexist - men have wallets, women have purses, and whilst "moneybag" is genderless it's probably the wrong term;) Whilst Monero is quite far from a point where this terminology becomes an issue, it's the sort of change that we can make sooner rather than later. The term we're going to be moving to is "account". We are aware that some may think that this implies centralisation, but there are key advantages to making this switch, especially as it pertains to new users not familiar with cryptocurrencies:
- It fits in with the whole "be your own bank" motion, which is a good way to explain cryptocurrency in general to people
- The idea of separation of accounts is already familiar to people - a married couple may have a joint account, a company will have an account (or accounts), a savings account would be separate, and so on
- People are familiar and happy with paying a fee for moving funds between accounts, so it won't be foreign to them
- It's the most familiar path for the general public. They understand creating an account, using a strong password, password recovery, etc. It's a natural transition for them.
We expect to make this change sometime in the next month or so when we have our next tagged release.
5. thefunkybits started a Twitter campaign to mention Monero to major exchanges and news outlets. He is paying 0.4 XMR per Tweet, so if that is something you're interested in
head on over to his thread on the matter.
6. Atrides, the admin of DwarfPool,
released an open-source Monero stratum proxy. This allows multiple mining machines inside of a network to all connect to the proxy server, so that only a single connection to the Internet is made. It's also useful for geographically distributed mining rigs, or even for miners that simultaneously GPU and CPU mine. More info is at his thread, and the
code is on his github repo.
7. This week we have been working on finalising the QoS bandwidth control, finalising the mingw64 Windows build system (thus removing the need for Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows builds), and an effort has begun to refactor the wallet code so that integration with the GUI will be much easier later on (and to make things ready for the wallet -> account terminology change).
Dev DiaryCore: we are going to be adding a development branch to the main repo so that vaguely working code can be merged there and rebased by all contributors faster. Right now the multiple branches are becoming messy for rebasing. This won't change that the main branch is staging, but it will provide better fluidity, and obviously all the changes can be merged into master when they are ready for broader end-user/environment testing. Ongoing testing of this branch is heavily encouraged, and opening github issues (for issues that actually exist) will be rewarded with 1x our eternal gratitude (limited to 10 per user).
Build: most of the mingw64 / msys2 is "done", thanks to the mikezackles' hard work. The branch is currently here:
https://github.com/mikezackles/bitmonero/tree/mingw. However, we will be pushing this (which includes the Windows service and daemonize changes, as well as the rpcwallet change) into the development branch on Monday. Once it's up, please test it, especially on Windows environments, so we can start stripping out the VS ifdefs.
Wallet: mikezackles is heavily refactoring the wallet code to be more legible, and more in line with our standards and expectations. This effort can be followed here:
https://github.com/mikezackles/bitmonero/tree/account_refactorBlockchain: tewinget's abstraction and refactoring of the blockchain functions is coming to a head, and we are hoping to start some specific integrations for performance testing so that an embedded database can be decided on and fixed.
Core: QoS will need to be rebased by rfree once the mingw branch is pushed to the development branch. Subsequent to rebasing, it will also be merged in to development, so barring any breaking issues it should be available for general testing within the next week.
Until next week!
- updated by fluffypony
