Developer's development diary.

[randpaulcoindev]

Ok I am going to start writing here about what I accomplish and issues I come across. It will likely be of value to someone somewhere.

Initially we started out branding the coin as Ron Paul Coin Deflationary but as I really started to read more about Rand I realized he isn't quite his father. People have to take certain concessions to have any chance of being elected in the US. That is a simple fact. I remain as much of a supporter of Rand as any but Ron Paul has been a principled man for decades and remains as solid as ever. I felt like my bandwagon approach to Rand Paul might not what I want for my first and likely only coin. I want the coin to support Rand for Presidency yet on the other hand I as the developer entertain notions that this coin could get some form of a foothold. So I decided to rebrand to Ron Paul Money and we are going to issue an asset of Rand Paul Coin. The primary value holder will be in RPM.

Today I'm going to work on the other sharedrops etc dogecoin. My problem with RPC required that I build the database with -txindex=1 -reindex=1 for ronpaulcoind. I also removed any account that had less than .1 RPC in it. This cleaned it up to some 7000 odd stakeholders from RPC.

I'm using code given by freetrade and just putting it in the daemon. It is a hack for sure but for these one time processes it works and is a lot faster than an intermediate database. I intend on providing a diff for each file I do this with. The goal is to make it as simple as possible for anyone who wants to audit any or all of the sharedrops.

Today I hope to have BTC done and the script to process all these into their proportions. If I get lucky I will have it compiled into the cli.

[randpaulcoindev]

Today we continued our question to get a testnet up and released. There will be a lot of detail here about what I have done technically so that it may be taken from here and put in documentation.


For the PTS snapshot I used the sources from http://ptsags.quisquis.de/

http://ptsags.quisquis.de/pts-2014-11-05.json.gz at 10% equity
http://ptsags.quisquis.de/pts_ags-2014-07-18.json.gz at 5% equity
http://ptsags.quisquis.de/btc_ags-2014-07-18.json.gz at 5% equity

It is taking awhile to download the  BTC blockchain using the bitcoin core software. We had a version that was many months old. For Doge will be using bootstrap.dat or try it. I've determined the first testnet will not have any doge addresses.

Since this is not a testnet in the traditional manner where we worry about leaked information, we're going to go ahead and put in the full addresses. I will then make a few BTC addresses and figure out how to import them and put them in the addresses. Perhaps I will write a script and then I can just email people these codes.

[randpaulcoindev]

The Bitcoin blockchain parsing is taking far longer than I expected. RPC was so fast. I was going to recreate the sharedrop from the blockchain but this takes far too long. Hopefully this pass is enough to extract a valid JSON for a testnet. Otherwise I will likely remove BTC from testnet v1.

Problems -

What is a good cut-off point for dropping addresses?  Every BTC address is not getting a piddling sharedrop. With the rate of parsing the DB with bitcoind we need to slurp the results in memory for pruning via this method in order to correct our release lag.

I would like to continue posting my "diary" here but it would appear we need to post more on bitcointalk. This does not fit in with my timezone but we will see.

I found a simpler way to do Nov 5th snapshots via a bitsharestalk thread. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11084 The downside is we are trusting the data presented but we may or may not use this in the live chain.

We started with a base of build_sharedrop.py and will create a sharedrop json from that.

We still need to recruite delegates. On the assumption the underlying protocol is sound then few Delegates are needed for the first round.

[hightower]

Do you have the wallet to download?  How to become a delegate?

[randpaulcoindev]

No wallet yet. Working through the process of creating snapshots then onto a testnet to get up and running and give out testnet funds. Try to make sure the genesis block isn't goofed up etc and iron out issues. I will go through these threads and PM everyone a key to enter into their wallet for testnet funds. Possibly post some key/address pairs if people wish to grab one. 

This is a learning process for me. We're learning things. Python for one.

Update

Tallying up the inputs and outputs on bitcoind failed 99.3% way into the process by a segv fault. This is where having a database helps. doh!  I'm going to proceed without bitcoin in the test database. Maybe I'll put doge instead.

[hightower]

I am eager to see how it works. I recently bought some PTS.  Can I use PTS for the testnet?

[randpaulcoindev]

I am eager to see how it works. I recently bought some PTS.  Can I use PTS for the testnet?

Only if you owned PTS before (on?) November 5th.

I will be able to give you funds.  I'm going to make a list of private/public keys and just PM them to people who are interested.  I can't give away funds openly on bitcointalk. 

If you have a public key you want to give me then that will work too.

[randpaulcoindev]

Well still no coin released but I did have new artwork finished.  It still needs a slight bit of work but I'm quite pleased with it.

http://i.imgur.com/IBWc3Gj.jpg



So we are on 0.5, but 0.6 has a new GUI. Once I get the gateway up I'll likely hurry it up and get a chain out there since we actually will be able to use things. Previously I was concerned about exchanges (yet I haven't contacted bter) but we have at least one. I was also concerned about having to do a lot of releases and merges until we found a stable release.

It is possible to even create an asset on the NXT asset exchange and utilize that.  CounterParty and MasterCoin seem likely too slow and ugly.

[hightower]

Are you issuing silver asset? Why not use PTS as the base?  Is it difficult?