A lot of questions have been popping up in regards to the development status and I wanted to take the time to respond and give the best information I can. I will try to address one item at a time and cover all the open items.
PoT Solution Development
As you know, we outsourced and hired an external consultant (team of 2) a couple of weeks ago in the hopes that they would be able to provide some kind of guidance in regards to additional possible solutions for solving the PoT problem. The contractor in charge was 4 days late with his proposal and his response was that he had another job that ran over and he would get us an answer ASAP. Unfortunately we still have no answer from them in regards to their ideas, solutions, etc.
We haven't been stagnant during this time and have been internally debating possible solutions.
We currently have 3 possible solutions that we have mapped out fairly well.
Use Master Nodes to create subnets of nodes to reduce the amount of nodes that need to communicate in the given timeframe. This solution has been viewed as too centralized and therefore has a negative overall outlook.
An iterative probabilistic model based on consensus proposed by Mike that would separate transaction processing from forging.
This allows us to extend the forging blocks to a longer timeframe (to allow easier verification) and also combine TX fees over a longer period of time. This system would reward all active nodes a portion of the Tx fees from the reward based on their cumulative uptimes since last down period or startup and spends during the last block.
The block generation itself can be random and forks validated by maximum difficulty since every eligible node receives the same reward regardless of who generates the block. The lottery aspect of of block generation and rewards is eliminated, which in turn, removes the incentive towards consolidation into mining pools.
This has a fairly positive outlook but we are still working out the details.
We can continue with the current "temporary" fix and make it permanent with a few tweaks. This solution is forging and provides all active nodes the same chance at forging (albeit random and non-predictable). We could take time to tweak and augment / enhance this solution and make it run better in regards to memory and RAM usage.
We have made the important decision to progress working on the Custom Block Chain (CMB) code while a part of the team continues to work on finalizing an algorithm for forging. We are open to input on these choices or additional ideas and would like to hear your thoughts. We will be offering a Bounty for any idea that gets selected and used as a final solution for Forging. This will be outlined below in it's own section.
In the meantime, we will be working to finish CMBs now as the CMB system is not directly tied to our forging rewards system.
Node Reward Program (NRP)
Tomorrow morning we will be promoting our NRP from our internal alpha test and initiating a 2 week beta test period on main net for our Node Reward Program. This program has been mentioned previously and will be a subsidized transaction fee system. The foundation will be using some of our XCR to create transaction activities in every block.
If all works as intended, this program will reward between .6 - 1 XCR in every block as a transaction fee to the forger. This will help reward our loyal supporters and the forgers who are with us during this testing phase.
We will test the program for 2 weeks and see how well it works. After the 2 week test period, we plan to maintain a long term NRP and may adjust the TX fee reward as necessary based on our test results.
Bounty Programs
The Foundation would like to institute a more robust bounty program to reward those of you who have been loyal and are still with us. These bounties will be outlined and tracked on CryptiTalk by Max and I and will cover several areas to include:
- Apps / Services
- TipBots
- Bug Reports
- Your Idea Here
That last one is open to anything you want to recommend we offer bounties for. Max and I would like your ideas on what you would like to see and we will be discussing it with you at CryptiTalk.
Forging Solution Contest
We would like to officially open up the floor for your ideas on how to solve the PoT / Forging debate. We want your ideas and thoughts on how we should go about rewarding Crypti users. This can be a completely different system, an alteration of our current system, or anything you can dream up. If you come up with a new idea that we have not already announced and we end up using your idea or a similar function to your idea for our final solution, we will award you 250,000 XCR.
The only rule is that the system must be fair and give all active users an equitable chance of forging a block. That is our ultimate goal.
Development Team Hiring
Arman and Boris will be traveling to Belarus in the next 1-2 week timeframe to finalize terms on a new office location as well as hire the additional developers for our new development team. Boris will then be moving to Belarus to lead our new central development team out of the new office space for faster and more organized development.
We will be hiring 2-3 new developers and this will drastically improve our ability to push out updates in a more timely manner. It will also bring additional expertise and ideas to the team that I think will only help for the future of Crypti.
This has been in the works for a while and we are excited to progress to finalizing our team. We will have more information and will introduce the new members and team after all deals are finalized and they are ready for action.
Web Re-Design
The re-design is continuing to progress. There are no specific updates other than we continue to work on solidifying the look and feel of Crypti and can't wait to show you the results. We will be starting the new website design this week and hopefully next weekend I can give you a sneak peek of our web design and logo before we start work on the web wallet.
Conclusion
That is all of the updates I have for now but I will respond to follow up questions. The big takeaway is that we are still working on a forging solution and are open to ideas or thoughts on the 3 proposed solutions. We are also going to skip ahead and work on finishing CMB while we work out the Forging solution in parallel.
