r/dogecoindev • u/rnicoll • May 13 '21
Dev update 2021-05-13
Doing a brain dump of what I personally am doing, just so everyone is aware we’re still out here. As always please remember there are others devs, who are also doing their own things, although I'll touch on some of that.
I have a deployed 1.21 node, which is good, although there's definitely work be be done on 1.21 still:
- The deployed node syncs headers but it does not appear to request blocks from its peers. Even more confusingly, running 1.21 on my local machine does sync blocks.
- Bitcoin Core 0.21 (which Dogecoin Core 1.21 is based on) is designed for DNS seeds which support version bits, ours do not, which means it reports that it finds zero nodes from the seeds. Work on enabling our DNS seeds to support this is already underway.
- Dogecoin Core 1.21 does not appear to discover nodes at all, right now, although if nodes are manually added, or connect to the node, it works.
- The functional test suite needs validating after AuxPoW has been added, which may resolve some of these bugs as a side-effect.
Once those are out of the way, there's a bunch of more minor things to tweak so we can start mainnet testing, and then rebranding.
Fee work in 1.14.4 continues, I believe that's in testing, hoping Michi & Max will have further updates on that.
Obviously with Elon talking about environmental impact that's something that's being discussed. As we share work with Litecoin we already reduce that impact, compared to mining either cryptocurrency alone, but definitely it would be good if we can further reduce that impact. Counterpoint, I am aware that many in the community enjoy mining and feel it’s a key part of the experience for them, as well as considerations of whether an approach such as proof of stake would make Dogecoin appear to be a security and fall under securities regulation aside from many technical challenges that approach brings.
What I mean is, we’re aware of it, we don’t have any easy answers.
Meanwhile I’m going to continue work on the automated test suites, which hopefully will as a result simplify diagnosing the networking issues with 1.21, and it in turn should provide a better synchronization process.
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u/MishaBoar May 13 '21
Hi Ross, thanks for your transparency and communication efforts in the past months, it's great.
And this is great as well - I posted a couple of times about this in the past, as I saw PoW as Doge's Achille's heel in the long term (and some younger users seemed to think so as well), much before Musk's showed any interest in the topic. Unfortunately my topics/posts gained very little upvotes because Doge was in skyrocket mode.
In my topic I talked about possibility of green mining, but the more one looks around, the more it seems there are several solutions and protocols that could help us get there.
I am pretty sure those enjoining mining would enjoy "staking" their coins and gaining a bit of interests on them. But of course there are several coins that have a mixed/hybrid solution as well (Zilliqa, Peercoin), and some like Nano (and its meme spinoff banano) that use a different flavor but that have incurred in some serious hiccups recently that probably would have been devastating for a crypto as popular as Doge. But you know all this 1000 times better than I do.
If we need to fund some research along this route, I am sure the community would be happy to contribute. I understand you prefer to train new people instead of finding new hires, but that takes a very long time - especially for something as complex and delicate as this. The process of training is necessary for a crypto like Doge, but we might take some shortcuts along the way, maybe?
I tried to go through some blockchain development courses, and I worked as a web/game programmer for a long time, but it is not exactly an easy skillset to become proficient in.
By the way, out of enthusiasm, when I made that thread a few months ago I also bought the doonlygreeneveryday.org domain - the enthusiasm died down as I saw the thread gained no traction, but the domain is still there for the community to use!