Decred Journal – September 2019

abstract art

Image: On-Chain Seasonality by @saender

Development

dcrd: Version 2 compact filters have been implemented. These use less space than v1 filters, which will be an improvement for light clients (SPV). Also, v2 filters will be used in block header commitments.

The mempool module received finer grained error codes. A bunch of old mining-related code was removed, including the removal of getblocktemplate in favor of getwork.

Multiple smaller changes for refactoring, improved test coverage and documentation, and bug fixes.

dcrwallet: dcrwallet’s Go code now uses decred.org instead of github.com in its module name. The idea to adopt this more widely to reduce dependence on GitHub is discussed here.

Build support was added for Go 1.13 and dropped for 1.11.

Work continues on integrating CoinShuffle++ support.

Decrediton: Account view received incremental improvements, while Security view gained the display of derivation info for addresses owned by the wallet (useful for debugging purposes).

Lightning Network integration is nearing completion. Work continues to refactor startup to a finite state machine in order to make it more robust.

Politeia: Politeia’s redesign is live on testnet and testing/feedback is welcome.

Significant progress is being made on the CMS, with the DCC Proposal System foundation and functionality for contractors to interact with it being merged along with a range of smaller improvements and bug fixes for both CMS and proposals site. Upcoming priorities on the proposals site are RFP proposals and Trillian integration which will allow for timestamping of individual pieces of content.

dcrstakepool: Major v1.2 release has landed on master.

A new admin-only page for handling low-fee tickets has been added to the front-end. This page will list all tickets which have been purchased with an insufficient fee, and allow the admin to manually add or remove those tickets from the list of eligible voting tickets. Previously this operation had to be performed manually by directly manipulating the database.

A new front-end design brings dcrstakepool up to the professional standard seen in other Decred software such as Decrediton.

Requested by VSP operators, support for encrypted SMTP connections has been implemented, including support for self-signed certificates. This allows VSPs to protect registration and account recovery emails in transit with SMTPS.

All communication with dcrwallet now goes through stakepoold. This architectural change lowers the number of RPC calls going over the network, decreases code complexity and allows ports between dcrstakepool and dcrwallet to be closed.

A custom MySQL data store has replaced the file-based storage solution for storing session cookies. This addresses several known security issues related to session data.

Google’s reCAPTCHA has been replaced with a self-hosted solution implemented in Go. All resources required for it are now hosted by the VSP rather than by a third party. The front-end included in this release executes no external JavaScript at all, granting a significant boost to user security and privacy.

Several security improvements were made to prevent cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks, leaking of private data to third parties, malicious links and caching of sensitive information by browsers.

The release is a result of 160 pull requests from 20 contributors made since Sep 2017. For full details of the release, see release notes.

dcrpool: After more than a year in the making, Decred’s open source mining pool is finally released along with a blog post about it. dcrpool features:

Developed by @dnldd in Go, this software is an important step in decentralizing PoW mining for Decred. Congrats on the release!

dcrlnd: The big work to port pull requests from the upstream lnd is finally merged.

Work has begun on enabling remote wallet functionality. This allows users to use their existing wallet instead of having to manage a separate wallet with separate seed for dcrlnd. It also allows users to launch a LN wallet directly for a wallet running in Decrediton, easing the UX.

cspp: added reconnection support, updated setup instructions, added Go 1.13 builds, bug fixes.

dcrdex: The foundations are being laid out with thousands of lines of code merged in master. Initial backends for DCR and BTC have been added. The spec has undergone several minor changes.

Unlike other software using the ISC license, dcrdex chose BlueOak. Motivation was discussed in this chat.

dcrandroid: Work on the new UI continues with an overhauled home page and other improvements to bring the app into alignment with the standard app design recommendations for Android. Work has begun on multi-wallet support. This will allow users to import their public key from Decrediton so that they can monitor the status of their tickets from their phone.

dcrios: Refactoring is underway to take advantage of new tx filter methods in dcrlibwallet. This includes an overhaul of the history page, a new data structure for storing transactions and an overhaul of the send page to enable users to send DCR to multiple destinations simultaneously.

Background sync was streamlined and made more reliable. This addresses an issue some users were encountering when syncing the blockchain was stopped due to the phone going to sleep.

UI optimization continues with overhaul of home page.

docs: A page for dcrtime has been added.

Work continues on developer documentation, which is expected to be ported from a private repo to the Decred GitHub organization soon for wider visibility.

decred.org: updated Roadmap, Wallets and Exchanges pages.

Several projects have switched their continuous integration (CI) system from Travis CI to GitHub Actions. Actions are faster, better integrated, are open source and shareable, and it’s overall much more flexible in terms of what it will allow.

Dev activity stats for September: 248 active PRs, 201 master commits, 28K added and 17K deleted lines spread across 15 repositories. Contributions came from 2-8 developers per repository.

People

Welcome to new first time contributors with code merged to master: imestin (dcrdocs), Muharem Hrnjadovic (politeia), Amir Massarwa (politeiagui).

@s_ben wrote a great Medium piece on his experience of working for the Decred DAO and makes observations on liquidity, volatility, shilling and his plans for the future.

Community stats as of Oct 2:

Governance

In September the Treasury received 14,510 DCR and spent 7,810 DCR (note: the spend occurred in early October). Using September’s daily average DCR/USD rate of $22.02, this is $320K received and $172K spent. As these payments were for work completed in August, it is also informative to consider them in the context of the August average daily rate of $26.23 - in which case the USD spent figure is $205K. As of Oct 2, Treasury balance is 641,802 DCR (11 million USD at $17.12).

i2 Trading won the competition to become Decred’s designated market maker, with approval of 68% vs 49% for Tantra Labs and 47% for Grapefruit Trading. i2 also attracted higher ticket participation of 41%, compared to 36% for Tantra and 33% for Grapefruit (the turnout is now visible on dcrdata alpha).

Tantra Labs congratulated i2, published a post about their experience on Politeia, and stated that they intend to continue with their plan to make DCR markets and will consult with i2 on this.

@permabullnino’s proposal for “Research & Publication of On-Chain DCRUSD & DCRBTC Indicators” was approved with 83% Yes votes and 27% turnout. Permabull will deliver 4-6 articles on the subject of the The Hyperactive HODLer’s Price (HHP), over the course of around 3 months. $3,500 will be billed for Permabull’s already published work and $13,000 will be billed for the new work.

The proposal for “DECRED Events & Meetups in the CIS in 2019-2020” was rejected with 4% Yes votes and 25% turnout.

Politeia Digest issue 22 has more info about these proposals. The second half of Sep has been quiet on Politeia, a new issue of Politeia Digest will be published when there are some new proposals.

Network

Hashrate: September’s hashrate opened at ~619 Ph/s and closed ~472 Ph/s, bottoming at 404 Ph/s and peaking at 679 Ph/s throughout the month. Pool hashrate distribution as of Oct 2: UUPool 21%, Poolin 19%, F2Pool 19%, lab.antpool.com 5.8%, BTC.com 2.9%, Luxor 2.12%, Coinmine 0.10%, BeePool 0.10%, suprnova 0.03% and others 30% per dcrstats.com. Pool distribution numbers are approximate and cannot be accurately determined.

Staking: 30-day average ticket price was 128.70 DCR (-1.35) per dcrstats.com. The price varied between 121.92-134.4 DCR. Locked amount was 5.22-5.33 million DCR, which corresponded to 49.87-51.15% of the available supply.

Nodes: Throughout September there were around 182 listening nodes and 406 total nodes per dcr.farm. Roughly 81% run dcrd v1.4.0, 6.5% are dcrwallet v1.4.0 and 6% are v1.5.0(pre) dev builds as of Oct 4.

On average for the month of September the DCR testnet LN shows 17 nodes, 35 channels and a total capacity of 227 DCR.

Integrations

Trust Wallet, the official wallet for Binance, announced the addition of Decred.

Exodus added Decred to its mobile wallet. This had been highly requested. In response to a question on Twitter, Exodus linked to their position on open source.

Decred support has been added to Joule, a popular Chrome extension that allows users to pay via Lightning Network and use their node as an identity on the web.

Uphold exchange added support for Decred as part of their #15daysofcrypto campaign.

StealthEX has added DCR. The service offers anonymous and accountless instant exchange of crypto.

InstaEx instant exchanger added DCR trading and submitted a pull request to get added on decred.org. In a short comparison with competitors, the service claims that no KYC or email is required, among other benefits.

Terms of both StealthEx and InstaEx prohibit use from a range of countries.

Tokenview has added the display of Decred blockchain data to their multi-asset block explorer.

Warning: the authors of Decred Journal have no idea about the trustworthiness of any of the services above. Please do your own research before trusting your personal information or assets to any entity.

Outreach

Decred outreach in September focused on education and awareness regarding the recent privacy implementation. Presentations were created for Surveying the Privacy Landscape and Decred Privacy, and Decred community organizers across the world have presented Privacy at various meetups. @jy-p travelled to San Francisco and Los Angeles, presenting Privacy at Decred meetups in both cities, and presenting the privacy landscape to the San Francisco Bitcoin Meetup. @Dustorf published a blog, Decred Privacy, Taking the Long Road, contextualizing privacy from a values and development perspective.

Decred in Depth released an episode featuring @Checkmate, where he delved into his research on Decred. Decred Assembly will shortly release a Deep Dive episode fetauring Decred developer @jrick, where he discussed many of the nuances of Decred’s path to privacy, the implementation, and next steps.

Decred and Exodus hosted a giveaway of Trezor Model Ts to 3 best tweets explaining why the author loves Decred. Congrats to the winners @encldi, @OfficialCryptos and @dcrstack!

Ditto’s September achievements:

Events

Attended:

Upcoming:

A total of 4 new reports were added to the events repo, and 1 more is coming. As a reminder, the events repo serves to collect experiences from worldwide events in one place and gives you an accessible report link to disseminate. The repo can be easily replicated to protect the data, and you can even submit a report without leaving your terminal.

Thanks to everybody for writing and submitting reports to grow our knowledge base!

Media

Selected articles:

Translations:

Videos:

Audio:

Community Discussions

Comm systems news:

Selected Reddit posts:

This section tends to feature Reddit threads that had a significant number of comments, many of these posts have low scores and therefore low visibility on Reddit.

Selected Twitter discussions:

Markets

In September DCR was trading between USD 16.49-25.20 / BTC 0.0020-0.0024. The average daily rate was $22.02.

DCR/USD lost more than 20% together with BTC/USD around Sep 24. Among possible causes discussed in the media are: sharp drop of Bitcoin’s hashrate, disappointing launch of Bakkt that didn’t bring the anticipated institutional bull run, and liquidations on derivatives trading platforms.

Relevant External

The Crypto Rating Council was announced, this is a group of cryptocurrency businesses producing ratings of whether cryptoassets are likely to be considered as securities by the SEC. An initial set of 20 ratings which position assets on a scale between 1 (not a security) to 5 (very likely a security) were released. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero and DAI received the best score (1). Assets like EOS, Tezos, Stellar and Hedera Hashgraph all received a 3.75 score, XRP got 4 and Polymath 4.5. The CRC will not publish the names of projects that received a rating of 5. More ratings will be published in the future. While the methodology is not published, it can be inferred from the bullet-point summaries of ratings that emphasis is placed on whether there was a token sale, whether that occurred before the system had utility, whether there was investment-like language in promotional materials for a token sale, and whether there is decentralized development and usage of the system.

More than 640 crypto projects did not publish any new code in 2019, according to a study by CoinCodeCap. The combined cap of these currencies is around $415 million, with the highest individual cap of $85 million. The exchange and market cap data for these tokens is incomplete, but in what is available, YoBit leads the exchanges listing such tokens by having 62 of them.

A settlement between the SEC and EOS was announced in which Block.One must pay $24 million in penalties for conducting an unregistered securities sale. This relates to the sale of ERC-20 EOS tokens in a year-long ICO that raised $4.1 billion, the fine amounting to 0.6% of the raised amount. According to Block.One’s press release the settlement only applies to the ERC-20 tokens, which have since been swapped for EOS mainnet tokens, considered to be in the clear and not require SEC registration for trading.

The Bisq network announced that four monthly cycles of its funding DAO have been completed. The Bisq DAO can mint BSQ colored coins to fund development work, and these are burned when used to pay trading fees. Proposals include compensation requests, bonded roles which receive ongoing compensation, parameter changes (trading fees were increased) and signalling approval for other development decisions. In each cycle the number of proposals was around 20 and the number of votes 200-300. The first and second cycles were highly inflationary, with much more BSQ minted than burned, but the 3rd cycle had similar levels of burning and minting and in the 4th cycle more BSQ was burned than minted. (missed in Aug issue)

The OKCoin exchange launched an initiative on Sep 3 to donate up to 1,000 BTC to the developers of BTC, BCH and BSV software. Verified OKCoin users can vote for the project they prefer and that project’s developers will receive 0.02 BTC per vote. This initiative was much discussed on Twitter, with some Bitcoiners promoting it to support the developers while others adopted a more disdainful attitude citing issues with the inclusion of BCH and BSV and the historical timeline presented. As of Oct 2 voting has closed and there are only 47 votes in total (equating to 0.94 BTC) but OKCoin have bumped the total amount donated up to 20 BTC.

CasperLabs, a startup led by Vlad Zamfir, has received $14.5M in Series A funding to work on Ethereum 2.0 Scalability.

Ethereum miners voted to increase the gas limit for blocks (and therefore block size) by 25%, in response to rising transaction fees. Miners control the Ethereum gas limit directly and can each edge the limit up or down slightly, so it took some time for the 25% increase to be settled on.

Ethereum also saw the deployment of the Istanbul hard fork on the Ropsten testnet this month, which happened earlier than expected and caused a chain split. This hard fork is expected to break a number of smart contracts in use on Ethereum mainnet, including around 680 of Aragon’s smart contracts.

Stellar launched an airdrop campaign giving users of Keybase free XLM, over the next 20 months Keybase users will receive monthly airdrops of 100 million XLM. Over the course of the 20 months this method of distribution will increase the circulating supply of XLM by 10%. Current circulation is 20 billion XLM out of 105 billion and Stellar Development Foundation controls the distribution.

Stellar Development Foundation also announced a plan to disable inflation of XLM as part of the version 12 upgrade. Stellar validators will vote to accept or reject this change. XLM inflation was intended as a way for holders to fund projects by setting an address to which their inflationary rewards would accrue. In practice, XLM holders have tended to nominate addresses they control or to join pools so that they can receive the inflation for their XLM holdings themselves. The inflation mechanism is not serving its intended purpose and therefore SDF wishes to disband it.

Dash launched the Dash Investment Foundation, an entity which will apply for Dash Treasury funds and then invest these in projects which aim to enhance the Dash ecosystem. The DIF is a legal entity which can make loans or investments in exchange for equity in the endeavours it funds. Decisions about what to invest in will be made by a board of elected supervisors.

Tezos Foundation announced funding for a second cohort of 14 Tezos Ecosystem Grants, again with no details of how much was awarded or under what terms. In an FAQ the Foundation explained that they do not disclose details of grants as it would harm their negotiating position. The Tezos Foundation Biannual update (released and missed in Aug issue) does have some information about how the Foundation is spending its resources. In the previous year $14.8M was spent on Research, Education & Core Development, $14.1M was spent on Community grants, and $8.5M was spent on Ecosystem Tools and Applications Grants. On Jul 31 2019 the Foundation held assets valued at $652M, 61% as BTC, 15% as XTZ, 15% in a “stability fund” (diversified portfolio of Bonds, ETFs, Commodities), and 6% as USD fiat.

Miniscript was announced by Pieter Wuille, it is a way to write some Bitcoin scripts in a structured way which allows static analysis, generic signing and compilation of policies. It is effectively a set of tools which make it easier to write Bitcoin scripts and be sure of how they will behave. (missed in Aug issue)

A large Bitcoin transaction of $1 billion caused speculation about who was behind it and what the purpose of the transaction was.

France has decided to not tax crypto-to-crypto trades. Only sells of crypto for fiat will be taxed.

European Central Bank (ECB) started another round of quantitative easing (QE). It will “purchase” bonds (pumping the price) at a rate of 20 billion EUR per month for “as long as necessary” to hit its euro devaluation goal. This is to “stimluate” the economic growth. Or, as Murad puts it, to “electrocute” people. Another good quote comes to mind: “people in cryptocurrencies believe that no living human being should have the power to create wealth from thin air”. If you hold EUR or were looking to purchase bonds on a fair market, a good question to ask ECB is where the money comes from and if they worked as hard as you to earn it. Also notice how the language is carefully chosen to not call it what it is, and how hard it is to find a news piece that would explicitly mention the source of money for these “purchases”.

GitHub user “DecredCoin” registered on Oct 1 2019 released “v1.5.0 Mandatory Update” for Decred. This is obviously a scam, as confirmed by the virus scan. Please report such things as soon as you see them.

For people who like to follow the Bitcoin discussion on Twitter, be careful what you say, as it seems the threshold for being blocked is getting lower and the overton window of acceptable discussion points or opinions is shrinking.

About This Issue

This is issue 18 of Decred Journal. Index of all issues, mirrors and translations is 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.

Your feedback and contributions are always welcome.

Credits (alphabetical order):