Decred Journal – July 2018

Decred OSCON team

Development

dcrd: Several steps towards multipeer downloads completed: an optimization to use in-memory block index and a new 1337 chain view. Maintenance: improved test coverage, upgrading dependency management system and preparing for the upcoming Go 1.11 release.

dcrwallet: A big change introducing optional privacy-preserving SPV sync mode was merged. In this mode dcrwallet does not download the full blockchain but only gets the “filters”, uses them to determine which blocks it needs and fetches them from random nodes on the network. This has on-disk footprint of 300-400 MB and sync time of minutes, compared to ~3.4 GB and sync time of hours for full sync (these are rough estimates).

jy-p: the server side of SPV (in dcrd) was deployed in v1.2.0, the client side of SPV (in dcrwallet) is in our next release, v1.3.0. Still some minor bugs in SPV that are being worked out. There will be an update to add the latest features from BIP 157/158 in the next few months. SPV will be optional in v1.3.0, but it will become the default after we get a proper header commitment for it (#general)

Decrediton: besides regular bugfixes and design improvements, several components are being developed in parallel like SPV mode, Politeia integration and Trezor support.

Politeia: testing started on mainnet, thanks to everyone who is participating. A lot of testing, bugfixing and polishing is happening in preparation for full mainnet launch. There are also a few missing features to be added before launch, e.g. capacity to edit a proposal and versioning for that, discussion to remain open once voting starts. Decrediton integration is moving forward, check out this video for a demo and this meta issue for the full checklist.

Trezor: Decrediton integration of initial Trezor support is in progress and there is a demo.

Android: app design version 2.0 completed.

dcrdata: development of several chart visualizations was completed and is awaiting deployment. Specifically, voting agendas and historic charts are merged while ticket pool visualization is in testing.

atomicswap: @glendc is seeking reviews of his Ethereum support pull request.

Dev activity stats for July: 252 active PRs, 220 master commits, 34,754 added and 12,847 deleted lines spread across 6 repositories. Contributions came from 6-10 developers per repository. (chart)

Network

Hashrate: the month started at 40.5 and ended at 51.6 PH/s, with a low of 33.3 and a new all time high of 68.4 PH/s. F2Pool is leading with 40-45%, followed by the new BeePool at 15-25% and coinmine.pl at 18-23%.

Staking: 30-day average ticket price is 92.6 DCR (-2.1). The price started the month at 94.6 and quickly retreated to month’s low of 85 until 1,860 tickets were bought within a single period (versus target 720). This pushed the pool of tickets to 41,970 (2.5% above target), which in turn caused 10 price increases in a row to the month’s high of 100.4. This was the highest ticket price seen on the new ticket price algorithm which has been in effect since Jul 2017. Second half of the month there was unusually low volatility between 92 and 94 DCR per ticket. Locked DCR held between 3.75 and 3.87 million or 46.6-48.0% of supply (+0.1% from previous peak).

Nodes: there are 212 public listening and 216 normal nodes per dcred.eu. Version distribution: 67% on v1.2.0 (+10%), 24% on v1.1.2 (-1%), 7% on v1.1.0 (-7%). Node count data is not perfect but we can see the steady trend of upgrading to v1.2.0. This version of dcrd is notable for serving compact filters. The increased count of such full nodes allows the developers to test SPV client mode in preparations for the upcoming v1.3.0 release.

ASICs

Obelisk posted three updates in July. For the most recent daily updates join their Discord.

New miner from iBeLink: DSM7T hashes Blake256 at 7 TH/s or Blake2b at 3.5 TH/s, consumes 2,100 W and costs $3,800, shipping Aug 5-10.

There were also speculations about the mysterious Pangolin Whatsminer DCR with the speed of 44 TH/s at 2,200 W and the cost of $3,888, shipping November. If you know more about it please share with us in #pow-mining channel.

Integrations

Meet new stake pool: dcrpool.ibitlin.com has 1% fees and is hosted by @life.

An interesting detail about decredbrasil.com stake pool was posted in chat:

emiliomann: stakebrasil is one of the pools with the lowest number of missed and expired tickets. It was one of the first and has a smaller percentage than the most recent ones who haven’t had the time to do so. (…) The Brazilian pool should be the one with the more servers spread around the world: 6 to decrease the latency. This is to explain to you why the [pool fee] rate of 5% (currently around 0.06 DCR) on the reward is also one of the highest.
girino: 8 voting wallets now. I just finished setting up a new one yesterday. All of them in different datacenters, 3 in europe, 3 in north america, 1 in brazil and one in asia. We also have 3 more servers, 1 for the front end, one for “stats” and one for dcrdata. (#general)

On the mining side, Luxor started a new set of pool servers inside mainland China, while zpool has enabled Decred mining.

StatX announced Decred integration into their live dashboard and public chat.

Decred was added to Satowallet with BTC and ETH trading pairs. Caution: do your best to understand the security model before using any wallet software.

Adoption

VotoLegal update:

Marina Silva is the first presidential candidate in Brazil using blockchain to keep all their electoral donations transparent and traceable. VotoLegal uses Decred technology, awesome use case! (reddit)

The story was covered by criptonoticias.com (translated) and livecoins.com.br (translated), the latter received hundreds of upvotes and comments on r/brasil.

On the OTC trading front, @i2Rav from i2trading reports:

We continue to see institutional interest in DCR. Large block buyers love the concept of staking as a way to earn additional income and appreciate the stakeholder rights it affords them. Likening a DCR investment to an activist shareholder/bondholder gives these institutions some comfort while dipping their toes into a burgeoning new asset class.

Marketing

Targeted advertising reports released for June and July. As usual, reach @timhebel for full versions.

Big news in June: Facebook reversed their policy on banning crypto ads. ICO ads are still banned, but we should be OK. My team filled out the appeal today, so we should hopefully hear something within a few days. (u/timhebel on reddit)

After couple weeks Facebook finally responded to the appeal and the next step is to verify the domain name via DNS.

A pack of Stakey Telegram stickers is now available. Have fun!

Events

Attended:

Upcoming:

Media

Featured articles:

Articles:

Some articles are omitted due to low quality or factual errors.

Translations:

Videos:

Community Discussions

Community stats:

Comm systems update:

Articles:

Twitter: Ari Paul debates “There can be only one” aka “highlander argument”.

Reddit and Forum: how ticket pool size influences average vote time; roadmap concerns; why ticket price was volatile; ideas for using Reddit chat for r/dcrtrader and alternative chat systems; insette’s write-up on Andrew Stone’s GROUP proposal for miner-validated tokenization that is superior to current OP_RETURN-based schemes; James Liu’s paper to extend atomic swaps to financial derivatives; what happens when all DCR are mined, tail emission and incentives for miners.

Chats: why tickets don’t have 100% chance to vote; ideas for more straightforward marketing; long-running chat about world economy and failure modes; @brandon’s thoughts on tokenizing everything, ICOs, securities, sidechains and more; challenges of staking with Trezor; ideas how to use CryptoSteel wallet with Decred; why exchange can’t stake your coins, how staking can increase security, why the function to export seed from wallet is bad idea and why dcrwallet doesn’t ever store the seed; ticket voting math; discussion about how GitHub workflow forces to depend on modern web browser and possible alternatives; funding marketing and education in developing markets, vetting contractors based on deliverables, “Decred contractor clearance”, continued in #governance.

#dex channel continues to attract thinkers and host chats about influence of exchanges, regulation, HFT, lot sizes, liquidity, on-chain vs off-chain swaps, to name a few topics. #governance also keeps growing and hosting high quality conversations.

Markets

In July DCR was trading in USD 56-76 and BTC 0.0072-0.0109 range. A recovery started after a volume boost of up to $10.5 m on Fex around Jul 13, but once Bitcoin headed towards USD ~8,000 DCR declined along with most altcoins.

WalletInvestor posted a prediction on r/dcrtrader.

Decred was noticed in top 10 mineable coins on coinmarketcap.com.

Relevant External

One million PCs in China were infected via browser plugins to mine Decred, Siacoin and Digibyte.

In a Unchained podcast episode David Vorick shared why ASICs are better than GPUs even if they tend toward mining centralization and also described Obelisk’s new Launchpad service. (missed in June issue)

Sia project moved to GitLab. The stated reasons are to avoid the risk of depending on centralized service, to avoid vendor lock-in, better continuous integration and testing, better access control and the general direction to support decentralized and open source projects.

Luxor explained why PPS pools are better.

@nic__carter published slides from his talk “An Overview of Governance in Blockchains” from Zcon0.

This article arguing the importance of governance systems dates back to 2007.

Bancor wallet was hacked. This reminds us about the fake feeling of decentralizaion, that custody of funds is dangerous and that smart contracts must have minimum complexity and be verifiable.

Circle announced official Poloniex mobile apps for iOS and Android.

On Jul 27 Circle announced delisting of 9 coins from Poloniex that led to a loss of 23-81% of their value same day. Sad reminder about how much a project can depend on a single centralized exchange.

DCR supply and market cap is now correct on onchainfx.com and finally, on coinmarketcap.com. Thanks to @sumiflow, @jz and others doing the tedious work to reach out the various websites.

About This Issue

This is the 4th issue of Decred Journal. It is mirrored on GitHub, Medium and Reddit. Past issues are available here.

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.

Chat links were changed to riot.im from the static web viewer that suffered from UX issues (filed here and here). We will consider changing back to the static viewer once they are resolved because it does not require javascript to read chat logs.

In the previous issue we introduced “Featured articles”. The judgement is subjective by definition, if you feel unfairness or want to debate the criteria please check this issue.

Feedback is appreciated: please comment on Reddit, GitHub or #writers_room.

Contributions are also welcome, some areas are adding content, pre-release review or translations to other languages.

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