Lite coin Development Update - JAN 2018

The development work of Litecoin 0.13.2 is almost done. There is really not much left to be done before the release.

However, Thrasher a.k.a Adrian Gallagher, has spent quite a lot of time on the development recently, and as many of you guys, he also needs some rest especially when the New Year holiday is coming. He will be back to work on Monday (Jan 2, 2017), and the release of 0.13.2 will be shortly after that.

If you want to know more detailed progress, feel free to check the code repository directly: https://github.com/thrasher-/litecoin/commits/0.13-dev81.

Development update Nov. 9
While most code development work of the main Litecoin repository has been finished, the majority of the devs are waiting for the reviewing and testing from developers like thrasher.

Instead of simply waiting, we start to work on another important project Litecore: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecore-litecoin/commits/0.13-dev3. You can see active commits going on there. As mentioned before, this will enable a lot more adoption of Litecoin.

The registration of the Litecoin Foundation is going on. The paperwork takes some time to finish.

The new litecoin.org website https://stevesloan.github.io/1 is completed by Steve. Within a few days, thrasher should be able to launch it.

We will use this Mailchimp email list to push to you guys updates about the development progress and other important stuffs in the future: http://eepurl.com/cnUGxH3. Signup now!

Development Update Oct 30 2016
We've fixed all test cases in https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/tree/master-0.10/src/test. Now we are reviewing the pull requests. Functional test should be after that.

We just got a pretty cool new design of Litecoin.org: https://stevesloan.github.io/4. This is done voluntarily by Steve S. Many thanks to him.

The registration of the foundation will take a few days more. We've got the domain names litecoin.foundation and litecoinfoundation.com.

Development Update Oct 22 2016
We are at a very important and exciting moment.

One big news about the Core development team: Pzjack has got a potential donation of 1 million CNY from a Chinese mining rig producer. This could fund three full-time Litecoin Core developers. And we've already got some good developers very excited about it.

To accept and properly manage donations and build a great Litecoin Core research and development team, we plan to register a nonprofit organization (a public company limited by guarantee in legal term) in either Hong Kong or Singapore, where people speak both English and Mandarin and thus are good for connecting the western and the eastern world. Also, both have very good legal environment, very low tax, and extremely low corruption. In order to ensure that every cent will be used at important places, we will make our financial information extremely transparent. Registration information, bylaws, and financial transparency policy will be released soon. The one million CNY donation should be the initial funding of the nonprofit.

We are also planning further funding sources. An extremely important one is miners. If successful, this would become the major stable funding source for the Litecoin Core team, and we believe this would become a game changer. Also operation of the nonprofit organization will be independent from the miners.

As promised, we started to move the updates from the repository https://github.com/wangxinxi/litecoin8 to the official branch https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/commits/0.13-dev4. We've already fixed 3/4 of the unit test cases in https://github.com/wangxinxi/litecoin/tree/0.13/src/test. The other half will be fixed within a few days. Code of the official branch is likely to be finished within one week. Then we will start to test it thoroughly.

Another developer Xinrong1 just finished his training and has committed real code to the repository https://github.com/wangxinxi/litecoin8. Congratulations & Welcome!

Development Update Oct 17 2016
We are still rebasing Litecoin 0.13. Now we have a working version.

You can clone and compile and try it out: https://github.com/wangxinxi/litecoin1. But don't use it for real transactions. If you have an old version of Litecoin Core, please remember to backup the old wallet first. The new version is not thoroughly tested yet, so there are probably some bugs remaining.

We are one step closer to our roadmap, aren't we?

Development Update Oct 8 2016
While the development work on Litecoin Core is been continued, two new members just finished their training. One is Peng Sun a.k.a voidmain ( https://cn.linkedin.com/in/void-main7 ); the other is Fan Yang a.k.a Fancy ( https://cn.linkedin.com/in/fancycedar6 ). Let's welcome them to the Litecoin Core team! The rest few new members are still finishing their training. Let's give them a little more time.

Both Peng and Fan will help Charlie Lee with the Litecore2 project first, which will enable Trezor wallets to support Litecoin and it can also be used in many other projects as well (You can get an idea on who are using Bitcore, and those will be likely to support Litecoin once Litecore is finished).

Peng is a full stack programmer interested in cutting-edge technologies. He is a serial entrepreneur who has joined two startups and even co-founded one himself. He loves mathematics and is fascinated by the consensus protocol behind Litecoin.

Fan, as a serial entrepreneur, is interested in creating things. He has rich experience on both server side and mobile development. Although not very successful at the beginning, he joined ppzuche 4 years ago, which was an early stage startup and is now the largest P2P car sharing platform in China and Singapore. He believes in cryptocurrency and Litecoin in particular because of its great potential in globalisation.

Development update Oct 1 2016
Right now, the Litecoin Core team is focusing on upgrading Litecoin to 0.13.1, which will include important features such as SegWit. Finishing the upgrade will fulfill major requirements in the Roadmap9 and will also pave the way for the newly proposed confidential transaction functionality.

As Litecoin development is becoming more exciting and inspiring, four new members just joined the team. All of them are very experienced in software development. Training of them is progressing smoothly. We will introduce more details of them later once the training is finished.

Development update Sep 23 2016
Research on confidential transactions (CTs) is being continued. As we think the theory behind it is solid enough for implementation, we start to think about the detailed plan.

Confidential transactions have been implemented in the Elements Alpha project [1], which is intended to work as a sidechain of Bitcoin eventually. While I personally feel sidechains are very useful, CT is much more convenient to use when it is integrated into the Litecoin main chain. And because we now have reference code done by the Elements Alpha project, implementing CT on Litecoin probably becomes much easier.

According to [2], we will need SegWit to implement CT as a softfork. This should not be too far away because we are planing to release a new Litecoin Core with SegWit soon.

Confidential transactions will increase the size of the Litecoin blockchain, but there is no need to worry much about it. Although each confidential transaction has a nearly 1.8 KB proof (the total transaction size is a little bigger than that), which is quite a few times bigger than a normal transaction, since it can be put into the witness part by modifying the current SegWit slightly [2], the actual number of transactions of each block will not decrease much. Of course, more disk space will be needed to hold the whole blockchain, but that should not be a big problem given the cheap hard drives. Also, more transaction fee may be charged for a CT.

When we were researching CT and checking its cryptography method, we saw elliptic curve is being used, which is not quantum resistant. This may not be a problem in the near future, but given the fast pace in the quantum computing field [3], we may have to plan ahead. Upgrading CT to a quantum resistant version, i.e., quantum resistant confidential transaction or QRCT named by @coblee, is possible by replacing the elliptic curve based method with quantum resistant ones like lattice based methods.

Further on, we realised that Litecoin itself is also not quantum resistant, because spending coins requires putting the public key in the transaction, and a quantum node can discover the private key based on the public key and modify the transaction's destination address. But this can be fixed without much effort [4].

The ideas about quantum resistance above are obviously still in a very early stage. However, given that all the upgrades can be implemented as soft forks, we see no reason that they are something unrealistic. Actually, we see very good hope that Litecoin could take the initiative and lead the whole blockchain community into considering this for the reason that Litecoin has a unified development team and a huge user base.