Hangouts #44

(Please note that this article is only to summarize the questions and points that were brought up in the 44th hangout. It does not cover every detail of the discussion)

Attendance

The Gridcoin 44th Hangout was attended by the following community members, listed in alphabetical order.@coltwlf, @confuest, @fkinglag, @geebell, @jringo, @mercosity, @peppernrino (Rino), @tomasbrod, Yoyo, and zipity.

Thanks and introduction:

As always a big thank you to the BeyondBitcoin community & @officialfuzzy for hosting the BeyondBitcoin Mumble server and allowing Gridcoin the free use of this resource!

These hangout summaries take considerable time to produce. Special thanks to @jringo for joining as co-writer, helping reduce the long sleepless hours spent to get these articles live 24 hours after the start of the hangouts.

As always, the hangout started with an introduction by Rino who not only hosts the show but also arranges these hangouts and does the edits of most of the recordings. This week’s hangout followed, in order of the most number of upvotes, the topics submitted by the community in the comments of the Gridcoin Community Hangout Post. If you ever have something related to Gridcoin that you’d like discussed, post a comment on the threads made by Rino. If you attend the hangout you will be given time to bring your topic to the floor. If you cannot attend, your topic will still be discussed and you will be able to follow the discussion by listening to one of the audio recordings or viewing the article summary.

Topic 1: Masternodes - Rob Halförd

On Wednesday the 22nd of November Rob Halförd, the creator of Gridcoin, announced Gridcoin Future Technology Base and created a poll in the Gridcoin wallet regarding this proposal. It was noted in the Hangout that the process around this Dash codebase proposal was received with mixed feeling by the community, though largely agreed to be seen as non-inclusive. Some members felt that the earlier Gridcoin 4.0 proposal (found here) was abruptly announced in a similar manner while others pointed out that discussions and debate are still ongoing regarding the Gridcoin 4.0 proposal. In the case of the new Gridcoin Future Technology Base proposal, a community poll was made live without much prior community conversation.

Masternodes are essentially full nodes which require monetary investment to run. Masternodes would have a copy of the full blockchain. It would be a system in which users would use GRC to lease the ability to run a full node while also having the opportunity to provide unique services - the details of these types of services have not yet been made clear. It currently appears that this consolidates power into a smaller group of early adopters and financially supported entities. Brod claimed that it seems as though Halförd feels that there is not enough full nodes on the Network, so from Halförd’s perspective masternodes will solve this problem. Brod continued by noting that since every wallet works as a full node, there is no problem for the time being. Jringo then pointed out that as the Gridcoin network and community grows so will the number of potential full nodes and that there is thus no need to monetize the process at this time.

With regards to the move to a Dash codebase Fkinglag brought up that historically, Darkcoin - the predecessor of Dash - lost many members when transitioning to Dash. However it must also be noted that Dash now has a much higher market cap.

Brod and Jringo, while both being hesitant of the idea of masternodes admitted that masternodes make some sense for very large blockchains. After a blockchain reaches a certain size, it becomes impractical for every user to store the entire chain. This is a problem which already afflicts more heavily used blockchains.

Currently, 86.5% of Gridcoin blocks being created are essentially empty blocks. This means that it is likely that Gridcoin will not face this scaling problem for some time. When storage scaling becomes an issue for Gridcoin, there may be solutions other than the current Masternode protocols. If at that time the best solution is a Masternode protocol, there will be more data informing us of how it will likely affect economics and governance. Additionally, this extra time would mean that the protocols could be implemented with confidence in their security and stability. Some possible alternatives which already exist can be found on various DPoS chains. An example of another solution in development would be PascalCoin’s Safebox data-structure.

There was a brief discussion comparing DPoS and Masternodes. The simplest comparison between the two with regards to power structures described DPoS as a direct representative democracy and Masternodes as an Oligarchic power structure.

GeeBell asked about the possibility of Pool Masternodes in which a group of individuals could run a single masternode together in a system which did not require them to directly trust each other. It was postulated that this could be possible, however further thought would need to be put into the idea before a conclusive answer could be provided. If it is possible, the system would then need to be developed and tested.

GeeBell went on to point out that change itself is not bad however, value must be analysed in all available paths forward and the community should not make decisions on admiration but rather on statistics, logic, and data. Brod added to this saying that he also wants change but from a different perspective. His concern is that the current codebase is old. Despite being a proponent for change he compared Halförd’s proposal to moving from “under the rain to under the drain.”

Brod’s idea is to take a codebase from a coin which has already incorporated the updates of Bitcoin and other Bitcoin Core blockchains and then to add the unique features of Gridcoin to that codebase. He argues that this is safer as the codebase we would use would run with established and secure protocols. The proposal presented by Halförd, on the other hand, has no proof of security or heuristic defense to it. It was argued that it is a major risk to secure the Gridcoin blockchain and its 13 million dollar market cap on untested protocols and algorithms.

Improving Gridcoin by including all of bitcoin’s commits would indeed take a year, if not more, of development time. Porting Gridcoin’s unique features into an already secure and trusted blockchain would take far less time and fewer resources.

Discussion then turned to Halförd “Green Proof of Work” protocol, which has also been called Proof of Lack of Work. This is a entirely new method of securing the blockchain developed by Halförd. He argues that it encourages block miners to keep work low thereby allowing the majority of processing power to be allocated to BOINCing. This system would be based off the x11 ASIC resistant hashing algorithm. During the hangout it was brought up that a google search of x11 produces a result for several x11 ASIC machines. Example. Brod claims that Halförd has designed a unique hash function but that it should not be trusted without proper testing, data, and verification which has not yet been presented. Brod went on to say that he understands what Halförd is suggesting with Green PoW and that in his opinion it does not make sense. In the current suggested implementation it appears as if a double spend attack could be successful if an attacker carefully creates multiple accounts that fulfil Halförd’s suggested criteria that were designed to stop this sort of attack.

To see Rob Halförd’s original announcement of his proposal, along with many in depth responses, critiques, and questions, follow the link here.

Topic 2: 4.0-2018 Roadmap

The full Gridcoin Research 4.0 Road map can be found in the multisignature article Gridcoin Research 4.0 Proposals and Preliminary Polls

We continued the discussion on sharedropping from last week, but this time we had Brod with us to help clarify some fairly important aspects of the process. He explained that if we decide to upgrade the bitcoin/peercoin codebase of Gridcoin, we will need to take all the user balances from the old blockchain and put them on the new blockchain. We are calling this “sharedropping” for now. The challenge when it comes to sharedropping is doing it in a decentralized way. We do not want to arbitrarily trust an individual or entity to correctly transfer all user balances from the old chain to the new chain. Brod does not think the idea he proposes in the original 4.0-2018 roadmap is viable. It is very new, very theoretical, and would require a good amount of time and resources to develop. The new thinking is that we could start with a new genesis block that has consensus in the network by requiring many nodes to create this genesis block. This still needs to be explored. Additionally, removing the plain text e-mails from the blockchain will end up changing the hashes of the transactions which would make it much more challenging to verify the sharedropped chain.

Topic 3: Call for Russian translators and verification of content.

It was noted that there has been an influx of Russian users to Gridcoin (Добро пожаловать!) and that it might be beneficial for the community to begin providing translations of essential information. Fkinglag, said that he can try to get in contact with a professional who can help in this regard. In addition, jringo suggested reaching out to the BeyondBitcoin community as they have already done work in this area and have an active translation community. It was also suggested that we could set up bounties or reach out to any English/Russian speaking Gridcoin/BOINC community members for help.

Topic 3.5: Help with the community Github organization.

The Gridcoin Community Github Repo is in need of some TLC (Tender Love and Care). There is a need to organize and categorize issues, and to make sure that things remain organized and properly categorized. Jringo offered to help with some of the grunt work, but of course everyone is invited to contribute!

https://github.com/gridcoin-community
https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Tasks/issues
https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Tasks/issues/184

Topic 4: Gridcoin State of the Network Report, November 25th 2017

Jringo’s state of the network report can be found here.

If you intend to delve into the RPC commands of the Gridcoin client, Brod has some advice to ensure that you do not accidentally break your wallet or disappear your GRC: Backup your wallet.dat, config file, and blockchain data before you begin, completely lock your wallet (don’t even let it stake when you’re exploring), and restart your wallet when you’re done. Also, Jringo reminded everyone to keep an eye out for a Gridcoin classroom hosted by Rino and fkinglag that will cover the dos and don’ts of RPC exploration along with some simple but useful (and fun!) RPC commands.

Additional information:

Next hangout!
Everyone is welcome to join the Gridcoin Community Classroom #003 on Saturday, December 2nd at 6PM UTC. You can get further details here or read the summary of the second Gridcoin Community Classroom in which an overview of the Gridcoin Research wallet is given.

To see a summary of the previous week’s hangout you can continue reading here

Further thanks:

Thank you to @jringo for co-signing this article. Thank you to all the devs who are continuously working behind the scenes. Finally, appreciation is extended to everyone in the community who contributed to the hangouts – in person or otherwise. If you wish to take part in the conversation, join a community forum such as Steemit, CryptoCurrencyTalk,
Discord, reddit, and Slack (request an email invite if you’d like to join)!

Here’s to the growth and development of Gridcoin!

Signed
@geebell and @jringo