Posts by Jake Yocom-Piatt
Trapped in the Web
December 9, 2022 The web is the world’s largest software platform and is, correspondingly, a central pillar of modern society. Large public corporations have built their fortunes by creating web-based businesses, investors in those corporations have reaped huge …What is wrong with Decred?
December 2, 2022 Decred has been in production for nearly 7 years, generates a reliable stream of useful, new, non-trivial technology, and has a dedicated core set of developers and users, but it has struggled to gain wider recognition and corresponding adoption. …The Federal Reserve: A Blatantly Rigged Game
July 1, 2020Many of us in the cryptocurrency space have been waiting for the next major market contraction for several years, and it has finally arrived, in spectacular fashion. COVID-19 and government response to it are disrupting markets in a way that few …
Iterating Privacy
August 28, 2019Decred’s privacy features and plans are ready to be revealed. The goal of our privacy features is to be simple, adaptable, and creative.
Rather than take the routes established by privacy-focused projects, e.g. ring signatures, zk-SNARKs, or …
Surveying the Privacy Landscape
August 21, 2019In this article I will discuss my views on the existing privacy technology in use in the cryptocurrency space. Since several projects have a primary focus on privacy, I will explain the various privacy technologies, which will help in understanding …
Politeia in Production
October 15, 2018Today, Decred’s proposal system, Politeia, goes into production on mainnet. This corresponds with the development organization ceding control over the accumulated project subsidy, which is roughly DCR 570,000, currently valued at approximately USD …
A New Kind of DEX
June 5, 2018Decentralized exchange (“DEX”) is a concept that has received increasing attention in the cryptocurrency domain as a result of exchanges being hacked, used as exit scams or subjected to regulatory actions. Several cryptocurrency projects exist with …
2018 Decred Roadmap
February 28, 2018It is finally time for the 2018 Decred roadmap to be released. 2017 has been quite an eventful year for both Decred and the entire cryptocurrency domain, with exchange rates surging and a substantial increase in interest from the conventional …
Politeia Platform Challenge
November 3, 2017Decred’s Politeia, a proposal system that is part of Decred’s governance system, has a vast amount of potential uses. As such, Decred can only reasonably explore a few of these use cases on their own.
The Politeia Platform Challenge is a …
Politeia: Proposals in a Timestamped Filesystem
October 25, 2017Rather than settling for governance infrastructure that is just good enough to get the job done, we opted to create what we consider to be the ideal infrastructure for self-governance of a cryptocurrency. We call our system for storing governance …
On-Chain Atomic Swaps
September 20, 2017As many of you know, yesterday marked the first cross-chain atomic swap between Decred and Litecoin. This is an important step in a direction that allows users to conduct trustless, cross-chain, over-the-counter (“OTC”) trades without a third party. …
2017 Roadmap Update 1
August 2, 2017A lot has happened since we announced our 2017 Roadmap on January 9th, so we figure a progress update is in order. We expect to complete the majority of what was laid out in the roadmap before the end of 2017. Here is a very brief summary of our …
Decred Recruiting
July 25, 2017Over the past several months, we have seen Decred contractors grow from a group of 10 to a group of over 25 individuals. This growth has been entirely organic, and while the growth has been significant, we are looking to further grow our ranks in …
Lightning Network in Practice
May 23, 2017Lightning Network (“LN” for short) is a recently-proposed, and even more recently implemented, low-latency off-chain micropayment system that can work with Bitcoin or other similar cryptocurrencies, such as Decred. Since LN makes liberal use of …
A New Ticket Price Algorithm
April 3, 2017The 1.0.0 release of Decred will include the Decred Change Proposal, DCP-0001, the replacement of the existing stake difficulty, i.e. ticket price, algorithm as the first hard fork voting issue on mainnet. This is a major change and is being …
2017 Decred Roadmap
January 9, 2017The time for a new Decred roadmap has finally arrived. While many users have been keen to know where the project is headed in detail, we have intentionally avoided laying out our longer term plans in order to prevent other projects from implementing …
zkc: Secure Communications
December 7, 2016As part of our ongoing effort to “decentralize all the things”, we have developed secure communications software that we are open sourcing today, called zkc. While zkc is not part of the Decred project proper, it is being released as part of our …
Upgrading Consensus
November 16, 2016Over the next few releases, Decred will enable Proof-of-Stake (“PoS”) miners to vote on proposed consensus changes. This voting will allow Decred users to exercise sovereignty over whether or not to accept hard fork changes, in addition to making …
Clearing the Route
October 5, 2016The most difficult groundwork required to clear the route to distributed decision making via Proof-of-Stake (“PoS”) in Decred is nearing completion. While many users and interested outsiders are understandably keen to see a steady stream of new …
Current Projects
August 17, 2016Welcome to the Decred Blog!
This is a status update on our projects currently in progress. We are working on several projects within Decred and want to keep users and other interested parties informed of what is going on. Recently, we’ve been …