Gridcoin Developer Update April 9th, 2018
Hello folks and welcome to another Developer Update from the Gridcoin team. I'd like to remind everyone that these posts will be created every two weeks unless a wallet update is pending that week.
Now to get things rolling, I want to show off the new art I am going to be using for these posts in the future. This artwork was created for me by the fantastic @joshoeah, who also designed our current purple GRC logo as well as many of the header art you see on Reddit, Steemit, and people's Slack profiles. He is truly a great artist and I can't thank him enough for his hard work.
Now on to the development work done in the last two weeks. A large amount of work put into development in these last couple weeks was this PR by /u/jamescowens. This PR is all about making the in-wallet Time to Stake calculations closer to reality. Currently the estimations given by the wallet for your time to stake are pretty rough, to say the least. This patch incorporates a lot of work done by Jim over the last month or so delving deep into the Proof of Stake code and making our estimations much closer to reality. For more details you can read the PR commits, but I must warn that they are very technical. Here is a snippet from the PR summary:
Note that the new ETTS algorithm gives radically different (and correct) ETTS values in the corner case of a big UTXO which is about to come off cooldown, but with only small UTXO's stakeable. The old calculation would only consider the currently stakeable (small UTXO's) sum and give a ridiculously long ETTS, when in fact the big UTXO would be stakeable very shortly and has a large probability of staking (i.e. short ETTS).
It also deals correctly with the middle ground of suboptimal UTXO count... If you have a relatively large balance, but have less than the optimal number of UTXO's, it will provide more realistic (longer in this case) ETTS values.
As far as other development work goes:
Work continues with @ifoggz's RPC overhaul that I mentioned in the last update (https://github.com/gridcoin/Gridcoin-Research/pull/1024). This is still being tested on testnet.
@ifoggz has also been working on fixes for the Neural Network for windows (note that we will be moving to a platform-agnostic NN sometime in the future). These fixes mainly relate to speeding up consensus syncing and eliminating errors when the project stat files are corrupted or otherwise not complete in some way.
@thecharlatan added optional support for Qt 5.9 with this PR. A Qt Version greater than 5.8 is needed for displaying for displaying the pie charts used in the voting window.
@tomasbrod has submitted the initial PR for Constant Block Reward. Note that this implementation still requires the outcome of an upcoming poll regarding the exact amount for the CBR value. Stay tuned to this PR for more updates in the coming weeks!
As testing coordinator, I wanted to add a little bit about testnet happenings in the last couple weeks. I personally executed three separate load testing events over that time period, but as a whole testnet has been relatively quiet, mainly testing the aforementioned RPC changes and dev branch in general. When the new Time to Stake PR is merged I expect this to be a major testing priority for us.
I would also like to add that I will be hosting a "Getting Started on Testnet" session on the Gridcoin Fireside Chat, hosted by @jringo every Thursday night in the Gridcoin Discord at 8 PM EST. Note that I will be hosting this topic either this Thursday (4/12) or next Thursday (4/19). More updates can be followed in the Fireside posts each week. Note that if you cannot make it to the meeting, they are recorded and put up on YouTube usually a few days later.
I do believe that wraps up this edition of the Developer Update. Expect to see another update two weeks from today (4/23), barring a wallet update around that time. If you have any comments or questions for the Gridcoin development team feel free to ask in the comments below. If I am not able to answer your question directly, I can certainly forward it to someone who can! Thanks everyone!
Many thanks for the mention @barton26! It has been a labor of love to try and improve the netweight, average difficulty, and estimated time to stake calculations!
Thank you for all the great work you have done for this coin's development!
[Deleted]
Thanks for the post and keep up the good work! I'm sure it's been mentioned before, but I'll say again that I think these updates are super important, in part just so people know that Gridcoin is continually being improved on the inside (even if at any given time things seem "quiet" on the outside.)
Thanks for another informative update. The progress appears to be very fast!
Note that there was another version of Constant Block Reward PR, and I submitted it a LONG time ago now. It was since withdrawn due to higher priority issues.
Yes but your new one is there now! :)
Love the new header!
And the update too, I suppose = )
You just planted 0.24 tree(s)!
Thanks to @barton26
We have planted already 3631.32 trees
out of 1,000,000
Let's save and restore Abongphen Highland Forest
in Cameroonian village Kedjom-Keku!
Plant trees with @treeplanter and get paid for it!
My Steem Power = 18659.15
Thanks a lot!
@martin.mikes coordinator of @kedjom-keku
Nice job on the update and artwork. Thanks for your hard work.
Thank you for the info and update.
I am trying to revive my testnet clients and just took my 3.7.11.0 clients and just imported my wallet.dat's from 6 months ago , and actually that is where I read the whole thing and saw your name and thought the line in the wiki was funny , I am sorry my bringing it up as something mentioned in the testnet wiki being funny pissed you off so much and see you are the " testnet coordinator " and am trying to help and to switch my 5 extra windows nodes and 3 extra linux nodes that are pointless on the production network as Investor wallets with 0GRC in each from back when we had the 2nd to last superblock issue of months ago and we were all asked to get as many windows clients online as possible to help the neural network and consensus block etc.
I see via an app I use that everyones testnet wallet versions are much older and need to know what version I should be running and yes I do know where https://github.com/tomasbrod/Gridcoin-Research and https://dl.bintray.com/gridcoin/deb/ are but I am pretty sure 3.7.11.0 or what not is more than likely not what I should be running.
Although I am still awaiting someone to come threw with sending me a nice chunk of coins like caraka did originally @ 50k and he did say he would ask rob to mint more and would send them to me but its been over 8 months , I was nice enough when Rino started doing testnet to send him 5k before he got sent 50k+ ( i shoulda been given back my small contribution amount to help him since litterally he got that before he got my 5k ) and I sat there every day for 3hr+ a day as I was asked to generate as much traffic and transactions on testnet as I could find the time to do to help and sent Mercosity 10-20grc transactions at a time up to a full 35k testnet GRC over 2 weeks and apparently got them stolen from me because he never returned them as the plan was and stopped talking to me and I could use some more coins although the 4 current wallet.dat's I have do have some. Anyways the conversation the other day should not have gone as it did , I was trying to get my extra clients up and helping via testnet vs empty investor wallets. Being you are the " testnet coordinator " you could have just iuno , nothing was said wrong and if its your job to help with testnet you could have helped me vs what happened and this should be a perfect way by letting me know the info so I can help out as thats about the only thing I continue to try and do , and well I get shut down.
The #testnet discord channel seems un-used and or old info and I just see caraka dropping that old versions for alt arch are build , obviously #testnet freenode for me in no point in going there and I would use the slack channel if I could get in invite. So please can you direct and help me out a little bit as I continue to be a team player and try to help where I can , or is my help just not going to be accepted?
Thanks . You can msg me via discord vs replying here if you wish.
Again thanks for the updates , will be looking for them every other week. If not I guess Thursday after surgery if I get to go home same day I will join " fireside chat " although its something I have been avoiding and just need a small bit of info and do not need a lesson on testnet or setting up a testnet or any form of the client I just need to know what version and could use some coins minted so I can sit and give my 2-3hr a day sending 10grc / 20grc etc in single transactions to generate as much traffic oon that neural network as possible. Thanks barton26 , keep up to great work and will be looking forward to latter posts.