HyperStake Development Journal (HDJ)

[presstab]

Can you tell me, how to manage staking?? each block should be.. xxx.

Because i'm staking more than 2 month in vps, nonstop, till now.

I would try to have 1k block as minimum size. 2-3k is the sweet spot right now though.

[David Latapie]

2-3k is the sweet spot right now though.

Closer to 2K than 3K. My 2400 HYP block hit the wall consistently today.

[inigthz]

Why my estimate staking increase each days??

[Startide]

I think Zer0sum was misconstrued slightly. I don't want to put words in his mouth so I will tell you what I took from what he wrote. I believe he said that Hyperstake has built a great platform. Don't fuddle about with gimmicks but think big! What can you do to fundamentally change crypto, commerce, contracts, finance, with such a platform? Zer0sum is challenging great minds to be more than even they thought possible. By the way, if indeed this is Zer0's thoughts I'm with him. I'm vested in Hyperstake for the long haul and look forward to all the hits and misses. Hopefully there's lots of misses, because that just means your thinking big and challenging yourselves, the community and the coin. Cheers! 

[rocoro]

Why my estimate staking increase each days??

Because difficulty is going up..  it's becoming more difficult to stake more coins.

More and more people are holding on and staking,  difficulty goes up as a result.

[Startide]

Hey there fellow stakers,

I had a harddrive fail and subsequently by the time I moved everything to the new drive my wallet had been offline for a couple of months. When I opened it up it synced but then it hung staking and wouldn't do anything. I am now trying to rebuild the blockchain but its taking FOREVER. Is there anyway I can jump start this?

Thanks!
Startide

[rocoro]

Hey there fellow stakers,

I had a harddrive fail and subsequently by the time I moved everything to the new drive my wallet had been offline for a couple of months. When I opened it up it synced but then it hung staking and wouldn't do anything. I am now trying to rebuild the blockchain but its taking FOREVER. Is there anyway I can jump start this?

Thanks!
Startide

Read here:
http://hyperstake.wikia.com/wiki/Bootstrap#How_to_load_up_the_blockchain_faster_.28bootstrap.29

And the ANN thread where you can download a bootstrap:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=678849.0

[Startide]

Thank you Rocoro I'm going to dive into it now.

Startide

[David Latapie]

A lot at happened since last entry in the HyperStake Development journal. A bit too much, I do not know where to start.
 
The price of stability
Price is stable which is good - of course those who bought much higher would prefer a higher price to recoup their losses, but the general interest is for stable price: less pain and you can still benefit but selling your stake, which encourage keepin in your wallet, thus strentghtening the network.
 
Enter the multisend
Multisend is finally here and it rocks.
 
Multisend http://hyperstake.wikia.com/wiki.RPC is the next step in HyperSend and the natural evolution of Stake4Charity. You can now send your stake to more than one address. Also, you are not limited to 50% or your stake anymore - all of it can be sent.
Remember to frequently sell to ensure liquidity (as well as profit) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=678849.msg8905328#msg8905328
 
Multisend for the moment is only accessible though RPC calls. For more information, read hyperstake.wikia.com/wiki/Multisend
 
If you experience heavy CPU or bandwith usage, you now have two RPC calls (accessible from the debug console): strictprotocol and strictincoming. Information on how to use them on the wiki: http://hyperstake.wikia.com/wiki.RPC
 
HYP is government-immune
Speaking of that, I realised that HYP is protected against a menace that threatens most PoS, particularly non high-PoS: a government could subpoena exchanges and get the hold on the network. Subpoena can have "gag orders" which prohibits the said exchange to even say they received a subpoena, which would make the action completely unnoticed. In the end, the government would control the coin, because in most case, exchanges as a whole have more than 50% of the coins.
 
This is not the case with HYP. A very large majority of HYP is held in wallet. So HYP is effectively immune from governement-seizing thanks to the economical incentive to keep the coin in the wallet - which by the way means that cold staking could be a bad idea, security-wise.
 
OpenAlias comes to HYP
HyperStake is the very first Bitcoin-based coin that implements OpenAlias (only with a bot for the moment). OpenAlias is a neat feature that make sending coin easier. This is a originally a Monero development and it is a big deal. Yesterday, Bitcoin become the second coin to accept it, since the PR for Electrum had been accepted (Electrum is a Bitcoin wallet which doesn't require to download the blockchain - it also has mnemonic seed, another neat feature I expect to see on HyperStake one day) More information about OpenAlias here: https://monero.cc/talks/monerotalks-whatisopenalias.html
 
You can already donate to the development fund by going on IRC and either joinin #hyppero or contacting hyppero and use the following address: donate.hyperstake.com (no www, no http, just this)
 
HYP saves they day
Presstab discovered an exploit that affect most PoS coins. Despite the tremendous security of HYP, it was still possible to use a "timedrift" (different from timewarp) to generate more coins than allowed. It was solved in a matter of day but unfortunately required a hard fork, so we are still recovering since not everyone is on the right chain at the moment. Still, it had been solve very fast. As someone wrote:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=678849.msg10492461#msg10492461
 
A potential bad salad situation was handled well.
 
A article was published on bitcoinist.net: http://bitcoinist.net/interview-presstab-pos-vulnerabilities/
 
Going testnet
We learnt from this lesson. We decided to create a testnet and now HYP has its own testnet to evaluate new features or anticipate exploit. This is a big step, because most coin do not have a testnet. To move to testnet, you should open a second wallet with the following instructions:
 
Reduce your load
If you experience heavy CPU or bandwith usage, you now have two RPC calls (accessible from the debug console): strictprotocol and strictincoming. Information on how to use them on the wiki: http://hyperstake.wikia.com/wiki.RPC
 
We also have, in beta, a feature called liteStake:
"liteStake beta: Previously the staking process would continuosly rehash the same hashes over and over, needlessly taking up valuable CPU power. HYP added a std::map that tracks the block height and the last time the wallet hashed on this height. Depending on your staking settings, the wallet will not begin a new round of hashing until after a certain amount of time has passed, or a new block is accepted. This means that there will be 1-5 seconds of CPU hashing once every minute, compared to continuous CPU hashing."
 
We at a time considering change some algo for a lighter one. Eventually, we decided not to, because the most significant one was already SHA256, which is particularly light. So this would have been a lot of work for only a low return.
 
There is too much to summarize here. That's the price of not updating the HDJ often enough. So browser the ANN https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=678849 and scan ##hyperstake and ##hyperstake-dev for latest info!

[David Latapie]

It has been two weeks since our security fork. I think we can look at the data and call it a success.

Coins per day has returned to approximately normal with full inflation control ability:


Difficulty is high as ever. Lots of people were on the old chain for a few days, or even a week or so, thus stocking up stake weight that raised the difficulty when they got to the main chain. I also beleive that the narrow time drift parameter will in general ensure that difficulty stays a little bit higher than it was because we now reject any blocks too far into the future that would have pushed our difficulty down.



Development is now starting to return to its normal path. The last two weeks we (me, allejupa, idunk, and many others) have focused on taking care of a lot of bugs in the code, getting the autotools build system to work smoothly, and launching a testnet so that we can test some cool new code without impacting the main net.  Now we will be focusing on moving HYP development forward.

Some development items on the list:
- Get gitian to build so that we can have a nice cross compiler which will allow for 32 and 64 bit binaries for Windows and Mac. This will also allow us to check our builds to make sure that viruses or bad code doesn't somehow make it into the build. Allejupa from irc is very interested in this project, and will be testing some code over the next few weeks.

- Stake time estimator I would like to build a tool that will let you hash each of your coin blocks days/weeks into the future and tell you when your block will most likely stake. This is completely doable, your PoS hash doesn't change through time, only the difficulty level does.

- OpenAlias port for HyperStake - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=678849.msg10420461#msg10420461

- Expand RPC infrastructure and make daemon more and more lightweight - As I continue to use my odroid as my main staking machine, I would like to make RPC much more like the QT wallet, but without the resource consumption. I think that a lot of us have Raspi's and other small arm based machines and that we should continue to make HYP the best coin to stake on these devices.

- MultiSend GUI for QT - MultiSend has been a huge success so far. It has efficiently replaced Stake For Charity and greatly expanded its capabilities. Now I would like to finish this project off by adding it to the GUI.