Developer brain dump, 16 Jan 2018

[sabbir2world]

We don't talk about the price for a number of reasons, not least of which is if you'd seen my investment history you definitely wouldn't take advice from me, but... hey, yeah, I know a lot of you have just had a really bad day, and it sucks. Take some time to remember what's important in life, hug your family, get some rest, come back to it tomorrow.

Jackson has tweeted he's not intending to be involved with Dogecoin in the future: https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/952391368067858432 , so lets talk about that for a bit. There's no status change in Max, Patrick or myself as a result of this. It does flag up a need to be better with single person failure risks, though; Jackson has the only control to the dogecoin.com domain, I have the sole access to the @dogecoin_devs Twitter account, etc. We're discussing plans to mitigate these risks currently.

Technical stuff we're working on:

Max spent most of this weekend working on updating tests from Bitcoin Core 0.14 to apply to Dogecoin Core 1.14. He's got all but four to pass, and we currently suspect those four reflect actual issues in Dogecoin Core 1.14. These are all around mempool handling and fees, and it appears this is an interaction between the Dogecoin fee schedule and Bitcoin Core changes for replace by fee (RBF) and spam mitigation. Fixing those is the next priority.
Of changes required to complete Dogecoin Core 1.14, 36 are done, 28 are pending review, 26 are waiting attention. Most of those 26 are a lot simpler (documentation, etc.) than those we've completed.
Patrick is working on Travis builds, which automate the testing process on Dogecoin Core 1.14
Basically - there's a lot of testing happening while we kick the hell out of it to make sure when it ships, it's robust.

Longer term, we're expecting to see a demo of the Doge-Ethereum bridge early next month. This is developed by an external team (and has its own specific bounty in Ethereum). If it works as expected, we'll then draw up a timeline for merging into Dogecoin; I anticipate we'll need a soft fork for this, and we'll handle comms around that when we know more. Examples of where this is useful is letting us do things like replacing the existing dev fund (which works on a simple 2-of-3 basis) with something much cleverer that can do pay-out based on complex voting requirements.

Patrick reports he's seen issues with Bitcoin Core 0.15 (around handling of the UTXO set). I want to have an internal release of 1.15 for testing 1.14 with before 1.14 goes out, but we may skip doing a full release and go direct to 1.16. Bitcoin Core 0.16 is meant to be out in May, so Dogecoin Core 1.16 would ship after that.

Things we need:

More service providers and stores accepting Doge - if you can do this, please do
Easier tools for service providers and stores. Shopify plugins, get Coinbase/Stripe/whoever to accept Doge. We may play silly, but we're a carefully engineered coin that's designed specifically to be a rapid drop-in replacement for Bitcoin, and anywhere with Bitcoin support should be able to support Dogecoin fairly quickly.
More fun - lets get some more memes going guys!
I'll get another update out over the weekend, but it may well be "We're still working out what's wrong with the fee schedule". Meanwhile, stay fluffy!

Ross

Edit: Oh, and you can see 1.14 progress as things are reviewed, at https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/pulls