My fellow MINT fans,
While my goal is to provide updates each week, sometimes other duties have priority and your Mint Development Update may be delayed or even skipped. Never fear, my intention for now is to keep working on MintCoin and providing regular updates!
From the development side, we had a bit of a disappointment when Enlil, one of our more productive technical MintCoin people, decided to leave the project. This was even more sad as it did not happen under good terms, and also included shutting down the explorer he had been running. A loss to MintCoin to be sure, and also a reminder that we should be careful to depend on individuals and try to build solutions operated by and for the community.
Both MintCoin and the larger crypto currency market have fallen in value since the last update. Of course this makes many people unhappy, and my plans for an early retirement are now on hold. Our technology is better than ever, so lets have a look at what happened.
I finally got update access to the official MintCoin GitHub repository. This is an important requirement for actually publishing a new version of the MintCoin wallet software!
https://github.com/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet
Since then I have been slowly merging changes into the upstream repository. This work is almost complete, and in the future the upstream GitHub will be the best place to get a pre-release version of the wallet code.
Also, any future bug reports or feature requests should go to the issue tracker of the official MintCoin repository:
https://github.com/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet/issues
The open issues in my personal repository will probably not be moved, but hopefully over time these will be resolved.
GitHub supports a Continuous Integration (CI) service called Travis CI. This runs a set of commands whenever a change is made to the code. The official MintCoin repository now makes sure that any proposed change will build both the GUI and daemon version of the MintCoin wallet.
In the future we can extend this to build the macOS version, once we get the build working on macOS at all. There may also be an ARM version to verify builds on that CPU family. Finally, we will use Travis CI to run tests once we have them working as well.
Note that Travis CI is not a great CI solution. It only runs a very old version of Ubuntu Linux, and has limited capabilities. But it is free, and does seem to work, so it is an improvement over what we had before (which was nothing).
We may investigate similar services such as the openSUSE Build Service which may provide additional systems to build and test against, as well as providing packages for us to distribute.
As mentioned in the introduction, Enlil left MintCoin development. Another contributor, Warren, will be busy doing other things for a while; we expect him to return though. A new developer has also started working with us and has verified the ARM build as well as had some thoughts about a mobile wallet, which would be amazing.
A group of developers has contacted me and expressed their interest in working on the coin. I have happily provided them with the list of issues that I have found, which is on the GitHub issue tracker. I have also let them know the plans, which you can read about at the end of this update. I have not seen any pull requests yet, but this is a hopeful sign.
While not strictly technical, people really want to know when MintCoin will be offered on more exchanges. While it is offered on four exchanges now, the only one that usually has any real volume of MintCoin is Cryptopia.
Minty All Day has applied for a listing on Kucoin, and is pursuing that, but it seems it will take a lot of money.
We have also been told that another exchange will be listing MintCoin in April. In addition, they have volunteered to provide a new blockchain explorer, which will be an open source solution.
People are very generous, and want to help with the technical work of MintCoin. I think that this is great!
After talking with Minty All Day and some other MintCoin administrators we came up with a model where the coins staked by the development fund wallet each month are donated to the active developers. This provides a sustainable way to reward people interested in MintCoin development. It also has the advantage that any new donations will help development indefinitely.
There are a few drawbacks of giving out the staked coins. One disadvantage is that developers do not do the same amount of work each month, so giving out the same coins each month does not make complete sense. Also, if many developers are working on the project then they are in a sense competing with each other for these funds. Indeed since the MintCoin interest is 5% per year this means that the monthly payment would be only 1/240th of the development fund.
I want to see this written up in a semi-formal charter, just explaining exactly how it works and what any new developers can expect. A number of open issues remain, such as who decides what rewards are given, what security there is on the fund itself, and what to do with the MintCoins in the fund if it ever shuts down.
While this is indeed a little bureaucratic, I think that the clarity and transparency would be appreciated by both anyone in the community who donates as well as any developer who works on MintCoin.
For full disclosure, Minty All Day awarded me the first monthly payout for February's work. I approached Enlil, who I felt deserved half or even more of this, but he declined. So, thank you everyone who has donated to the MintCoin development fund! It is good to be appreciated, and I am very grateful.
Another thing that everybody really wants is a MintCoin whitepaper and roadmap. That's really not my thing, but luckily community member Crypto Panda has provided a draft whitepaper to meet the demand, along with a proposed timeline for a whole set of Mintcoin actions.
Both will require some review and probably some further discussion, but the roadmap and whitepaper may provide and answer to people who think that MintCoin is lacking these important documents. The intention is not for it to be "done", but rather for the whitepaper to be a living document, requiring periodic review.
Yet another topic that repeatedly comes up is when MintCoin will do a coin burn.
A coin burn is when a large number of crypto coins is destroyed. The idea is to increase the value of the remaining coins. This is typically done by investors or developers of a coin in order to increase the price.
In my opinion, a coin burn makes little or no sense for a coin like MintCoin. We have no venture capitalists who hold tons of coins that they got for free and stand to gain by a coin burn, likewise the initial developers have long since left the project. The MintCoin world basically has people who have coins that they value equally.
So a coin burn could be done by burning coins equally for all MintCoin holders. For example, we could burn 99.9% of MintCoins by moving the decimal point. That would mean that a "new MintCoin" would be worth 1000 times as much, but everyone would have 1000 times fewer. Low-valued fiat currencies sometimes do this, but that is because it becomes cumbersome to fill a suitcase with bills to buy a cup of coffee. MintCoin has no such problem.
Another approach would be for one or more individuals to destroy their coin and other people do not; in that case the people who "burned" their MintCoin would be reducing their own wealth so that other people can increase theirs. Of course that is their right, but I would rather see people that want to give money away do it to a charity or some other good cause, rather than just destroying it.
However, community member Ash has explained a possible alternative way forward with the coin burn: a game.
As I understand it, the basic idea is to match two players who want to try to win some MintCoin. Both players provide a fixed amount of MintCoin, and the winner gets all of their own back and half of the MintCoin of the lower. The remaining MintCoin get sent to a "burn address" which cannot ever be used to send from, effectively being destroyed.
This approach has created a lot of excitement in the community, so it will be interesting to see how it works. While for now I am still basically opposed to a coin burn, I will be happy to admit that it was a good idea if it provides real benefits to MintCoin!
We added a few issues:
- We would love to figure out how to reduce the memory footprint.
- A suggestion for a new main screen was presented.
- Having a system to monitor how long it takes MintCoin to transfer on the Internet will make sure that it remains fast.
- We should provide better status reporting when the wallet is syncing.
As it has been for weeks now, the main focus now is still getting a new version of the wallet that we can publish which contains updated builds and all of the fixes that we can. In order for that to happen, we still need:
- A macOS wallet build
- A 64-bit Windows wallet build
We have had an offer of an Apple machine for the wallet build, which would help. We have also had an offer of someone who can rent a Virtual Private Server (VPS) for this purpose for the project, which we will do if we do not get an actual machine.
Things that would be nice:
- Speeding up the initial sync
- Packages for popular distributions (like Debian and Fedora packages)
Things that should be done someday:
- Wallet code automated testing
- Reducing the memory footprint
As always, if you would like to help, please either contact us or just fork the code on GitHub and start hacking.
I should be putting out a new update in just a few days with fresh, minty development news. Until then, keep minting on.
Minty wishes,
Shane Kerr
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
