Just a little note to let you good people know that I didn't lose my account and I'm still around here...
Someone said I could be running a witness if I wanted to. I can't set that up right now but maybe in the future again.
Last time I was in contact with this platform I remember vividly, walking through primorski park in Varna late at night having a heavy discussion with megadrive, after which I threw up my hands and we outta here.
I'm in Serbia again. I have 6 weeks left on my visa and 1 week needed to get the beta prepared for Parallelcoin, and an expected month long beta, then setting the activation height and publishing the final release binary, and off I skidoo... I don't know if I will be coming back to Serbia once I leave. After almost 3 years of every 3 months immigration drama, and inordinate sums of money for my minimal tax obligation, being kicked out of the country for 2 months when it was my only place to live... I dunno, I need a holiday. I am considering going to Ukraine, or maybe Russia. I have NFI. All I know is that I most likely will have to leave again.
I am back here because I have been back working on ParallelCoin Plan 9 Hard fork. I was working remotely before but funds are very thin and it was not so easy as I remembered - as I mentioned in previous posts, price inflation is very visible after 2 years away. Serbia living costs are at least 20-50% lower than Bulgaria. Even though Serbian Dinars are slowly falling from 125 5 years ago to 117 per euro. Local production is cheaper.
Due to the complexities of my unstable back-end systems, and my lack of experience with collaborating on a git repository, and even worse competence in my main colleague, who was going to do the wallet GUI, and all the disruptions of immigration issues and shit in between, I ended up scrapping the old version of the wallet and writing it again from scratch, simpler and more elegant.
Note that I implemented from scratch the scrollbars in the GUI. Well, from the super minimal original scrolling widget which is probably fine for mobiles for simple tasks, but when there is thousands of items like in the history view in my testnet mining, without a grabber indicating the position such a list is ridiculously long and takes ages to scroll with a PC, where on a mobile you swipe and it has momentum that dissipates over a second or two.
It is still not quite a normal scrolling view, you have to construct it out of at least two distinct rectangular blocks that span the width, this has implications with how to create layouts, though as I have found, literally it works properly with two items in it. But it does the job and it's fast and smooth.
Here's some screenies of the current state of the wallet:
The send page isn't done yet, it's my next task, and after that I need to track down a bug that causes the wallet not unlock properly after the node is running for about 10 seconds. I can stop the wallet, and then login, but that's not how it should be working.
I could just auto-disable the node at startup, same as the wallet is (because of being fully encrypted) and then it would be bypassed but I really want to get it fixed. Oh! I guess I could just change the code to stop the node first before starting the wallet, that lets me dodge a bullet with a line of code.
It took a little work to find the work-around for a bug in the Go exec library to make this page above work, and I built a custom, minimalistic make-like tool that has the commands baked into the binary, which was mainly built so these pieces of information could be planted into the binaries.
On startup all of the apps print this information which is important coming up to the beta test, and any time later, in the logs. I have theoretically implemented the logger, but tried to use json for it. JSON is not suitable for continuously streamed documents or streaming of any kind, so I will likely roll a custom parser that can just append log entries to the file.
One other task required before beta is to get that logging turned on by default, and add a 'bug' icon on the top right next to the help button which will open up a page with an input to describe the issue, attach one or more arbitrary files (screenshots, screencaps) and send the configuration (with passwords redacted) along with the log file, to help further.
Beta Test!
Anyhow, beta testing will hopefully start next week, anyone here who is interested in joining the beta, we are planning to add bounty payments for bug reports that will be paid out when the hard fork activates.
ParallelCoin Plan 9 protocol has a pure CPU mining proof of work, based on integer long division that overflows CPU caches, so for those who never was able to catch a break mining with GPU or couldn't afford ASICs, this chain will never have an ASIC and probably GPUs will be less power efficient than 64 bit computer (that can run windows/linux), possibly low power ARM processors will compete at a low level with their 32 bit dividers but higher efficiency.
Besides the possible benefit of getting a bounty for helping us get the release polished, this new PoW regime will mean a lot more accessible mining for a blockchain finally again.
As mentioned in this article about impending new CPUs from Intel, https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-rocket-coming-q1-2021/ - supply of CPUs is very tight. I'm not surprised with all the sabre rattling going on from china towards the 90% memory manufacturing and all the tarrifs and shit, and the continuing insanity shutting down economies, that acquiring hardware to mine ParallelCoin will be competing with one of the tightest markets for CPUs in a long time.
This should help keep the size of mining operations from exploding rapidly to turn small miners 1-10 rig farms into a liability so quickly. But there is plenty of old hardware that can do it. Even old mobile phones will be able to do it.
So, if you want to be part of the action, let me know in the comments and I'll point you to the venue for discussion and so on, it's not ready just yet, so, be patient, but next week we will need beta testers. We have quite a number of people here locally who can help and will help (who are involved in some way) but by way of marketing the project, the beta will let people see what I have built and play with it.
The rewards regime also is changed, though we are going to see a halvening in the next week or so, it will be dropping to a 9% annual supply growth rate, and anyone who understands compounding interest will understand that means that first year is 9% more supply, and second year is 9% of 9% more supply, etc etc to infinity. Well, to the limit, in the mathematical sense.
Our chain has a very low total supply and sizable amounts of the tokens are known to be lost or are tied up in ongoing, dragging administration proceedings in New Zealand, about 118k, and another 30-40k was lost (possibly stolen, need to analyse the chain to figure it out exactly) with Altilly's recent hack. Probably another 30-40k are missing due to failing hard drives and accidents. I'd guess the total supply therefore is around 280k and that means that it is never going to be more than about 300,000 units.
Anyhow, just felt like I should drop in and say hello and update folks about things.
- l0k1