Decred Journal – May 2018

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Development

dcrd: Significant optimization in signature hash calculation, bloom filters support was removed, 2x faster startup thanks to in-memory full block index, multipeer work advancing, stronger protection against majority hashpower attacks. Additionally, code refactoring and cleanup, code and test infrastructure improvements.

In dcrd and dcrwallet developers have been experimenting with new modular dependency and versioning schemes using vgo. @orthomind is seeking feedback for his work on reproducible builds.

Decrediton: 1.2.1 bugfix release, work on SPV has started, chart additions are in progress. Further simplification of the staking process is in the pipeline (slack).

Politeia: new command line tool to interact with Politeia API, general development is ongoing. Help with testing will soon be welcome: this issue sets out a test plan, join #politeia to follow progress and participate in testing.

dcrdata: work ongoing on improved design, adding more charts and improving Insight API support.

Android: design work advancing.

Decred’s own DNS seeder (dcrseeder) was released. It is written in Go and it properly supports service bit filtering, which will allow SPV nodes to find full nodes that support compact filters.

Ticket splitting service by @matheusd entered beta and demonstrated an 11-way split on mainnet. Help with testing is much appreciated, please join #ticket_splitting to participate in splits, but check this doc to learn about the risks. Reddit discussion here.

Trezor support is expected to land in their next firmware update.

Decred is now supported by Riemann, a toolbox from James Prestwich to construct transactions for many UTXO-based chains from human-readable strings.

Atomic swap with Ethereum on testnet was demonstrated at Blockspot Conference LATAM.

Two new faces were added to contributors page.

Dev activity stats for May: 238 active PRs, 195 master commits, 32,831 added and 22,280 deleted lines spread across 8 repositories. Contributions came from 4-10 developers per repository. (chart)

Network

Hashrate: rapid growth from ~4,000 TH/s at the beginning of the month to ~15,000 at the end with new all time high of 17,949. Interesting dynamic in hashrate distribution across mining pools: coinmine.pl share went down from 55% to 25% while F2Pool up from 2% to 44%. [Note: as of June 6, the hashrate continues to rise and has already passed 22,000 TH/s]

Staking: 30-day average ticket price is 91.3 DCR (+0.8), stake participation is 46.9% (+0.8%) with 3.68 million DCR locked (+0.15). Min price was 85.56. On May 11 ticket price surged to 96.99, staying elevated for longer than usual after such a pump. Locked DCR peaked at 47.17%. jet_user on reddit suggested that the DCR for these tickets likely came from a miner with significant hashrate.

Nodes: there are 226 public listening and 405 normal nodes per dcred.eu. Version distribution: 45% on v1.2.0 (up from 24% last month), 39% on v1.1.2, 15% on v1.1.0 and 1% running outdaded versions.

ASICs

Obelisk team posted an update. Current hashrate estimate of DCR1 is 1200 GH/s at 500 W and may still change. The chips came back at 40% the speed of the simulated results, it is still unknown why. Batch 1 units may get delayed 1-2 weeks past June 30. See discussions on r/decred and on r/siacoin.

@SiaBillionaire estimated that 7940 DCR1 units were sold in Batches 1-5, while Lynmar13 shared his projections of DCR1 profitability (reddit).

A new Chinese miner for pre-order was noticed by our Telegram group. Woodpecker WB2 specs 1.5 TH/s at 1200 W, costs 15,000 CNY (~2,340 USD) and the initial 150 units are expected to ship on Aug 15. (pow8.com – translated)

Another new miner is iBelink DSM6T: 6 TH/s at 2100 W costing $6,300 (ibelink.co). Shipping starts from June 5. Some concerns and links were posted in these two threads.

Integrations

A new mining pool is available now: altpool.net. It uses PPLNS model and takes 1% fee.

Another infrastructure addition is tokensmart.io, a newly audited stake pool with 0.8% fee. There are a total of 14 stake pools now.

Exchange integrations:

OpenBazaar released an update that allows one to trade cryptocurrencies, including DCR.

@i2Rav from i2trading is now offering two sided OTC market liquidity on DCR/USD in #trading channel.

Paytomat, payments solution for point of sale and e-commerce, integrated Decred. (missed in April issue)

CoinPayments, a payment processor supporting Decred, developed an integration with @Shopify that allows connected merchants to accept cryptocurrencies in exchange for goods.

Adoption

New merchants:

An update from VotoLegal:

michae2xl: Voto Legal: CEO Thiago Rondon of Appcívico, has already been contacted by 800 politicians and negotiations have started with four pre-candidates for the presidency (slack, source tweet)

Blockfolio rolled out Signal Beta with Decred in the list. Users who own or watch a coin will automatically receive updates pushed by project teams. Nice to see this Journal made it to the screenshot!

Placeholder Ventures announced that Decred is their first public investment. Their Investment Thesis is a clear and well researched overview of Decred. Among other great points it noted the less obvious benefit of not doing an ICO:

By choosing not to pre-sell coins to speculators, the financial rewards from Decred’s growth most favor those who work for the network.

Alex Evans, a cryptoeconomics researcher who recently joined Placeholder, posted his 13-page Decred Network Analysis.

Marketing

@Dustorf published March–April survey results (pdf). It analyzes 166 responses and has lots of interesting data. Just an example:

“I own DECRED because I saw a YouTube video with DECRED Jesus and after seeing it I was sold.”

May targeted advertising report released. Reach @timhebel for full version.

PiedPiperCoin hired our advisors.

More creative promos by @jackliv3r: Contributing, Stake Now, The Splitting, Forbidden Exchange, Atomic Swaps.

Reminder: Stakey has his own Twitter account where he tweets about his antics and pours scorn on the holders of expired tickets.

“Autonomy” coin sculpture is available at sigmasixdesign.com.

Events

BitConf in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Jake Yocom-Piatt presented “Decentralized Central Banking”. Note the mini stakey on one of the photos. (article – translated, photos: 1 2 album)

Wicked Crypto Meetup in Warsaw, Poland. (video, photos: 1 2)

Decred Polska Meetup in Katowice, Poland. First known Decred Cake. (photos: 1 2)

Austin Hispanic Hackers Meetup in Austin, USA.

Consensus 2018 in New York, USA. See videos in the Media section. Select photos: booth, escort, crew, moon boots, giant stakey. Many other photos and mentions were posted on Twitter. One tweet summarized Decred pretty well:

One project that stands out at #Consensus2018 is @decredproject. Not annoying. Real tech. Humble team. #BUIDL is strong with them. (@PallerJohn)

Token Summit in New York, USA. @cburniske and @jmonegro from Placeholder talked “Governance and Cryptoeconomics” and spoke highly of Decred. (twitter coverage: 1 2, video, video (from 32 min))

Campus Party in Bahia, Brazil. João Ferreira aka @girino and Gabriel @Rhama were introducing Decred, talking about governance and teaching to perform atomic swaps. (photos)

Decred was introduced to the delegates from Shanghai’s Caohejing Hi-Tech Park, organized by @ybfventures.

Second Decred meetup in Hangzhou, China. (photos)

Madison Blockchain in Madison, USA. “Lots of in-depth questions. The Q&A lasted longer than the presentation!”. (photo)

Blockspot Conference Latam in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (photos: 1, 2)

Upcoming events:

There is a community initiative by @vj to organize information related to events in a repository. Jump in #event_planning channel to contribute.

Media

Decred scored B (top 3) in Weiss Ratings and A- (top 8) in Darpal Rating.

Chinese institute is developing another rating system for blockchains. First round included Decred (translated). Upon release Decred ranked 26. For context, Bitcoin ranked 13.

Articles:

Audios:

Videos:

Community Discussions

Community stats: Twitter 39,118 (+742), Reddit 8,167 (+277), Slack 5,658 (+160). Difference is between May 5 and May 31.

Reddit highlights: transparent up/down voting on Politeia, combining LN and atomic swaps, minimum viable superorganism, the controversial debate on Decred contractor model (people wondered about true motives behind the thread), tx size and fees discussion, hard moderation case, impact of ASICs on price, another “Why Decred?” thread with another excellent pitch by solar, fee analysis showing how ticket price algorithm change was controversial with ~100x cut in miner profits, impact of ticket splitting on ticket price, recommendations on promoting Decred, security against double spends and custom voting policies.

@R3VoLuT1OneR posted a preview of a proposal from his company for Decred to offer scholarships for students.

r/dcrtrader gained a couple of new moderators, weekly automatic threads were reconfigured to monthly and empty threads were removed. Currently most trading talk happens on #trading and some leaks to r/decred. A separate trading sub offers some advantages: unlimited trading talk, broad range of allowed topics, free speech and transparent moderation, in addition to standard reddit threaded discussion, permanent history and search.

Forum: potential social attacks on Decred.

Slack: the #governance channel created last month has seen many intelligent conversations on topics including: finite attention of decision makers, why stakeholders can make good decisions (opposed to a common narrative than only developers are capable of making good decisions), proposal funding and contractor pre-qualification, Cardano and Dash treasuries, quadratic voting, equality of outcome vs equality of opportunity, and much more.

One particularly important issue being discussed is the growing number of posts arguing that on-chain governance and coin voting is bad. Just a few examples from Twitter: Decred is solving an imagined problem (decent response by @jm_buirski), we convince ourselves that we need governance and ticket price algo vote was not controversial, on-chain governance hurts node operators and it is too early for it, it robs node operators of their role, crypto risks being captured by the wealthy, it is a huge threat to the whole public blockchain space, coin holders should not own the blockchain.

Some responses were posted here and here on Twitter, as well as this article by Noah Pierau.

Markets

The month of May has seen Decred earn some much deserved attention in the markets. DCR started the month around 0.009 BTC and finished around 0.0125 with interim high of 0.0165 on Bittrex. In USD terms it started around $81 and finished around $92, temporarily rising to $118. During a period in which most altcoins suffered, Decred has performed well; rising from rank #45 to #30 on Coinmarketcap.

The addition of a much awaited KRW pair on Upbit saw the price briefly double on some exchanges. This pair opens up direct DCR to fiat trading in one of the largest cryptocurrency markets in the world.

An update from @i2Rav:

We have begun trading DCR in large volume daily. The interest around DCR has really started to grow in terms of OTC quote requests. More and more customers are asking about trading it.

Like in previous month, Decred scores high by “% down from ATH” indicator being #2 on onchainfx as of June 6.

Relevant External

David Vorick (@taek) published lots of insights into the world of ASIC manufacturing (reddit). Bitmain replied.

Bitmain released an ASIC for Equihash (archived), an algorithm thought to be somewhat ASIC-resistant 2 years ago.

Three pure PoW coins were attacked this month, one attempting to be ASIC resistant. This shows the importance of Decred’s PoS layer that exerts control over miners and allows Decred to welcome ASIC miners for more PoW security without sacrificing sovereignty to them.

Upbit was raided over suspected fraud and put under investigation. Following news reported no illicit activity was found and suggested and raid was premature and damaged trust in local exchanges.

Circle, the new owner of Poloniex, announced a USD-backed stablecoin and Bitmain partnership. The plan is to make USDC available as a primary market on Poloniex. More details in the FAQ.

Poloniex announced lower trading fees.

Bittrex plans to offer USD trading pairs.

@sumiflow made good progress on correcting Decred market cap on several sites:

speaking of market cap, I got it corrected on coingecko, cryptocompare, and worldcoinindex
onchainfx, livecoinwatch, and cryptoindex.co said they would update it about a month ago but haven’t yet
I messaged coinlib.io today but haven’t got a response yet
coinmarketcap refused to correct it until they can verify certain funds have moved from dev wallets which is most likely forever unknowable (slack)

About This Issue

This is the second issue of Decred Journal after April. It is mirrored on GitHub, Medium and Reddit.

Some source links point to Slack messages. Although Slack hides history older than ~5 days, you can read individual messages if you paste the message link into chat with yourself. Digging the full conversation is hard but possible. The history of all channels bridged to Matrix is saved in Matrix. Therefore it is possible to dig history in Matrix if you know the timestamp of the first message. Slack links encode the timestamp: https://decred.slack.com/archives/C5H9Z63AA/p1525528370000062 => 1525528370 => 2018-05-05 13:52:50.

Most information from third parties is relayed directly from source after a minimal sanity check. The authors of Decred Journal have no ability to verify all claims. Please beware of scams and do your own research.

Your feedback is precious. You can post on GitHub, comment on Reddit or message us in #writers_room channel.

Credits (Slack names, alphabetical order): bee, Richard-Red, snr01 and solar.