Getting to know the Decred blockchain

I started exploring the Decred blockchain in more depth at the end of 2019 as I scoped out a plan for the third phase of the Open Source Research Program. With a local instance of dcrdata up and running, I watched it whizz through hundreds of thousands of blocks worth of data, creating tables representing every address, transaction, input, output, and vote - the origins and destinations of all the DCR in existence. There’s something satisfying about seeing all of the work it does to prepare that raw data for consumption through charts and tables.

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The Decred community considers privacy to be a fundamental human right.

Protecting the privacy of Decred users has been a core tenet of the project since it’s inception. To quote the Decred constitution:

Privacy and security are priorities and shall be balanced with the complexity of their implementations. Additional privacy and security technology shall be implemented on a continuing and incremental basis, both proactively and on-demand in response to attacks.

In late 2019, Jake Yocom-Piatt revealed a much anticipated privacy solution for Decred - CoinShuffle++ (CSPP). The introduction of CSPP enables users to anonymize their Decred by mixing with the steady stream of ticket transactions which flow through the network as part of …

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Introduction

Bitcoin gamified time-stamping. Decred gamified decision-making and formed a digital collective, a technology-enabled experiment in human organization.

The core infrastructure is under construction; the same holds true for Decred communications.

Last year, Politeia enabled direct stakeholder sovereignty over much of the marketing spend, the Contractor Management System (CMS) was introduced to track spending, and Decred iterated and experimented with new marketing tactics.

The following is a summary of 2019 spending, an evaluation, and a call to arms to think about and grow Decred differently in 2020.

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We recently observed the Monero hack in which an attacker compromised getmonero[.]org and replaced one of the binaries with a malicious coinstealer.

The Monero team has good reliability when it comes to security and all indicators seem to show that the attack was sophisticated. Point being no matter what your security posture, this could happen to anyone.

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One consistent question over the past few months as Decred’s Lightning Network has entered testnet, is on how it relates to the staking system and if they will be somehow integrated.

Now that dcrlnd, our port of the most prominent LN implementation available, is synced to the upstream work and nearing mainnet release, I feel it’s time to show one of the things that we’ve been leading up to: a plan for implementing multi-owner tickets over the Lightning Network.

The greatest benefit of this work is that once deployed, the staking system will be truly approachable by all interested parties, even those without sufficient funds to purchase a full ticket and in the future where lower stake rewards make large on-chain splits …

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