Update Friday, Sept 7th 2018
Well, this has been a strange 24 hours. About this time yesterday I wasn’t quite sure I was going to be ‘employed’ beyond the end of the month, and now we’re sitting here with the funding goal pretty much achieved! I can now comfortably say I’ll be able to continue full-time on Grin through the end of February 2019. By that time, I will have been community-funded for 13 months (and we might even be somewhere near a mainnet launch).
I’ve been really humbled by the reaction of the community to these past few funding drives, and hope I can live up to everyone’s expectations. I posted my thoughts about the greater Grin community (for unrelated reasons), but much of what is in there directly applies to my current sentiments.
I’ll shout out to everyone who’s donated when I close this campaign, but right now I need to again thank:
@catnic For leading the charge, for a generous donation, and (via BlockCypher’s newly announced Grinmint Mining Pool) backing up her belief in Grin by spending time and resources adding to its infrastructure.
@awrelllRo for an incredible $40,000 donation to meet the funding goal in one massive swoop. This is definitely the single most dramatic gesture we’ve seen in our fundraising adventures so far, and we’re all very, very grateful for this.
Will probably close the campaign successfully shortly, but if anyone is still itching to donate to Grin right this moment, please feel free to do so directly into the fund. I intend to transfer anything above the current funding goal into the the general Grin fund we’ve been talking about as soon as the logistics of it are set up. (Or you can wait until then, it’s all good)
By the way, I’ve seen some kind words in relation to my work, but I’m neither a wizard nor a rock star. There are better developers on the Grin team than I, some part-time and some who have found other ways of funding their Grin development addictions. I’m just the one who’s been visible and in people’s faces for funding, and I really need to thank everyone else on the team for allowing me to continue these efforts.
But also: Right. Enough Oscar speeches. Been distracted by fundraising and other issues the past couple of days, but this isn’t what I’m being paid to do. As a special bonus this week, let’s talk development.
So we decided last week that there will be a Testnet4, with a very short list of consensus breaking isses this time. Mostly aggsig changes (one bug, several enhancements to support higher level constructs), mainly dual proof-of-work changes (which will mean Grin-miner and cuckoo-miner work in the coming weeks) and I’d also like to squeeze in BIP-32 Compatibility in the wallet. I’m addressing the BIP32 work first, so that entails:
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integrating the BIP-32 library from rust-bitcoin into Grin, a necessary first step completed earlier this week.
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Changes to the underlying libsecp256k library to support this. There are quite a few things that need to go into our libsecpetc fork, with a lot of work done by @jaspervdm and @gary to fix and refine our aggsig library. In addition, there are some modifications that both @jaspervdm and I want to do to essentially embed values within bulletproofs (in his case, allow for multi-party bullet proofs, and in my case embed BIP32 derivation indices to allow BIP32 wallets to be quickly and easily restored). So I’ve done a rebase of our fork from the latest version of Andrew’s code, know more or less what I need to do, and will combine it with the results of @jaspervdm’s changes. I’m not finished with my part yet, but it’s next on my list.
I’d like to get all of our combined changes to libsecp256k put to bed for the time being, and once that’s done, the focus will be to update the wallet code to actually use BIP32 keys (thinking of the number of annoying tiny changes and broken tests that will entail is already giving me a headache,) but once that’s done our wallet will be more-or-less compliant with existing software tooling, as well as be a lot more flexible about how keys are derived, hopefully giving us some more tools to think of creative wallet solutions.
Also on my radar is the dual-PoW, but @tromp still needs to do some work there before that can really begin to be integrated (which is fine as the BIP32 work will still take a while).
So that’s it for now. Everyone enjoy your weekend (I definitely know I’ll be a bit more relaxed,) and don’t forget to ring your mother.