Transcript of bytemaster's Update Portion of the Hangout
Dan Larimer of Cryptonomex speaking with the BitShares community regarding BTS 2.0 updates, STEALTH milestones and sidechains.
Listen to Episode 137 - Create a BitShares Account
Transcript
bytemaster: We posted a demo of the new STEALTH GUI. People have been testing it on the test network and have gotten some feedback on there and have continued to fix a lot of loose ends there. We ran into a problem updating the assets. A serialization bug is preventing us from finally enabling the STEALTH asset and transferring it to onceuponatime.
Unfortunately fixing the bug will require a hardfork. So rather than hard forking for that one issue we're going to incorporate several different features simultaneously in an upcoming hardfork. One of those is abit's work on free transactions or coindays to pay transaction fees. That seemed to be something that was very much liked in the Community.
The other thing that we're going to attempt to roll out at the same time is the removing of negative voting. We can talk about the rationale for that in this Mumble session. It creates a security risk. It doesn't fully reflect voters intention and it causes a game of cat and mouse where you just keep going. It requires more voter activity. So we had this discussion in the past and for whatever reason I momentarily forgot why we shouldn't have done it when I designed the negative voting for Workers. But we can talk about that in greater detail on this call.
So what you can expect in the coming week is a new pre-release of BitShares that has abit's changes, has removed downvoting for Workers and fixes the issue with onceuponatime's STEALTH asset. So that's that. As far as the GUI, like I said this past week we've been publicly testing the STEALTH feature so you can all see that work has been done and is being refined.
The major source of holdup right now is actually another feature which STEALTH depends upon, but is not necessarily part of STEALTH, and that is server side hosting of encrypted wallet files. This will allow you to login to your wallet from any computer on OpenLedger. It will mean you are automatically backed up even if you're using the lightwallet.
These features are designed to make it easier for people and ultimately more secure because you're less likely to forget your backup or delete something or your browser cache gets lost. There's just so many things that can go wrong when users are entirely responsible for making backups of their data in addition to remembering their password.
I apologize for the delays in the STEALTH but I think at the end of the day we're actually delivering more features at the same time and they all benefit each other in a form of synergy. So STEALTH in particular depends on backups a lot more than other systems because every time you receive a STEALTH transfer you get a transfer receipt and if you don't save that transfer receipt then and you restore a backup you won't have that money any more. So we definitely need this feature as a part of making STEALTH reliable.
The team's been working very hard on all of that and perhaps most importantly a lot of this work is being done without any compensation from the blockchain. There's a little bit of money that's coming in from the support worker for Blocktrades has hired us is going towards bug fixes and optimizations, not any new feature development.
One of the complaints that we've had is that there is too much bandwidth required to stream data to the light client. The Blocktrades guys have implemented a compression on the websocket connection which should dramatically reduce the bandwidth required on streaming the data. There's still work that we can do and we have looked into reducing the amount that we actually push. We more or less push every change, anything that changes during a block we push onto the client so that the client can update the user interface.
Not all clients need all data. You don't need to know when someone else's account has changed. But for consistency and reliability of the user interface we've just pushed everything right now, everything that changes. We're still going to look into reducing that to just pushing what you need and that will further reduce it.
But in the meantime the compression approach saves bandwidth. I don't have the exact numbers but considering how robust JSON is I wouldn't be surprised if we saved over 50% reduction in bandwidth usage on the light client. So these are all positive developments for BitShares.
[00:06:49] Initial STEALTH Fee
[00:10:34] Server Side Backups
[00:11:14] Mobile Wallet
[00:11:51] STEALTH GUI Difficulties
[00:18:07] STEALTH GUI Usability
[00:19:33] STEALTH Technicals
[00:21:53] STEALTH Maintenance
[00:23:22] STEALTH Specifications
[00:25:21] STEALTH Fee Backed Asset
[00:26:13] Sidechains
[00:30:45] Multiple Sidechains
[00:34:50] Sidechains and Ethereum's Proof of Stake
[00:36:59] Sidechain Witnesses
[00:37:55] Sidechain Resources
[00:42:07] Sidechain Witness Nodes
[00:44:55] Sidechain Funding
[00:47:07] Sidechain Use Case
[00:47:42] Sidechains Effect on bitAssets
[00:48:48] Sidechains and Plasma
[00:50:53] Sidechain Cost
[00:52:07] Sidechain Value and Marketing
[00:53:53] Sidechains and Bitcoin Unconfirmed Transactions
[00:58:52] Bitcoin on the BitShares Network
[01:04:59] Decentralized**** Satchel Bag
[01:12:35] Committee Proposal on Fees
[01:15:43] Cryptonomex Funding