Hi Nav Coiners!
It’s time for your weekly Monday Update from the Nav Coin Team. More solid progress and lots of great news!
Navtech Anon BetaWe’ve had another busy week at Nav Coin HQ with the second round of beta testing returning some helpful insights to us. With the increased limit of 1000 NAV implemented we saw some of the partial transactions experience delays in reaching their destination. The reason for this is quite simple and interestingly not actually to do with the anon scripts as such.
I loaded the outgoing nav pool with 1 transaction of 50K NAV to seed the pool. When sending the script sends the first partial transaction out to the end user, it was unable to send the second transaction before it first receives change from the 50K NAV in a confirmed block. As each block takes 30 seconds to confirm, this caused a small but longer than expected delay in receiving the funds out the other end.
To fix this, I have since split the 50k into smaller pieces which means there’s more transactions which can be committed to a single 30 second block. The second fix is to pause for 30 seconds if the script does happen to encounter this situation and attempt again on the next block once the change has returned.
For more information about how spending transactions and getting change works in a block chain, you can check out the bitcoin wiki:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/ChangeThe ongoing advice which will be included in the documentation when we decentralise the system is to split the NAV loaded to the outgoing NAV pool into smaller transactions, perhaps 1000 NAV each when the server is first setup. Of course, over time as users make transactions, the change will naturally accumulate. This should be a non-issue moving forward, but it’s nice to know that it’s been observed and it is handled correctly.
With this information and resolution in place, we are happy to move forward with the beta test. I’ve added another set of processing servers to the cluster which means we have officially moved into phase 3 of the beta test! If this goes well we will ramp up to our clusters initial production capacity over this week and run a full systems test.
Navtech Anon BetaProgress Report
Phase 1: Low value transactions with small test group on single server pair - complete 
Phase 2: Medium value transactions with large test group on single server pair - complete
Phase 3: Medium value transactions with large test group on multi server cluster - in progress
Phase 4: Large value transactions with large test group on multi server cluster - pending
THE UNBREAKABLE CODE
If you want to see the Navtech Anon System in action and help us with the beta testing, send me a PM with your email address and i will add you to our slack channel.
Nav Coin Full Node Wallet with Sync FixSoopy has done some amazing work this week and put together a great fix for our full node wallet. One of the interesting things about working with a blockchain which has a fast block time like Nav Coin is that it is easy for two wallets to mine the same block and broadcast it. Because the block time is near to the time it takes for the confirmed block to propagate the network this happens regularly. The management of this is all handled very neatly by the source code forked from Bitcoin. One block will be declared correct and override the other on the network and the other block is considered orphaned and replaced with the block which got consensus. It is the processing of these orphaned blocks which has been causing the slow down of the syncing on the full node wallet. Because of our fast block time and high incidence of orphans, this was making syncing the full node wallet very tedious.
The fix which has been implemented resolves the slow syncing caused by the numerous orphaned blocks. I was able to sync 24 hours worth of transactions in about a minute. So i hope more people can now enjoy using the full node wallet.
The new version is 3.7.0 and is firstly available on Windows (zip) and Linux (source). We are working on the OSX zip and both the installers and hope to get them out in the next day or two.
To get the new full node wallet visit our downloads page:
http://navcoin.org/downloadsNav Coin Full Node Downloads - Windows Wallet (zip) - 3.7.0
Nav Coin Full Node Downloads - Linux Source - 3.7.0
Trojan Virus ScanThe false positive being returned by VirusTotal has been resolved in this new version of the wallet also. So we can finally put this issue to rest. As we have always stated, there is no Trojan inside the Nav Coin wallet and there never will be. Feel free to run the new version through VirusTotal for your own peace of mind.
Thunderclap Prize DoubledThe Thunderclap campaign is going really well so far! We’re over half way with 259 people subscribed and a social reach of over 200k. Thank you for all your support thus far. We really believe this is a great way to spread the word about Nav Coin and look forward to seeing its impact on the 20th of October.
We are so appreciative of all your efforts, we are officially doubling the prize to 20,000 NAV!That’s right, one lucky supporter of the Thunderclap campaign will receive this sweet prize which is worth approximately 1.5 BTC at the time of writing.
If you want to get involved, go to the link below and allow the Thunderclap app to post to your social media accounts. It will only post once, on the 20th of October, so don’t be afraid of it spamming your accounts. Tell all your friends and help us spread the word!
https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/47929-navcoin-powered-by-the-people Raspberry PiThe new 3.7.0 source code has been deployed on our Raspberry Pi and is so far proving to be more viable than the previous wallet versions. We were hoping to have this image finalized for today’s update but there are still a few minor issues which we are addressing. As with everything, we prefer to honest with our progress rather than announce release dates unless we are certain of them, but we can let you know that we believe we are very close to getting this released to the public.
That’s it from the team for this week. We are kicking goals and marching towards the public release of the Anon Network followed by its decentralization. To keep up with the latest, follow us on twitter and join us on slack!
Talk soon,
Craig.
