It 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 finance sector. Decred has continued with its approach of generating deliverables before hyping them, despite many other projects in the space continuing to relentlessly hype their work far in advance of generating deliverables or focusing on exchange listings in lieu of doing any substantive work. We have substantially improved our marketing in the past several months and expect a strong uptrend to continue on this front throughout 2018. Here is a summary of what we have planned for the rest of …
Recently Google disclosed a new class of vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown. Folks in the Decred community have been asking questions about the implications of these bugs for Decred. This post delineates implications of these exploits and possible countermeasures. These bugs are akin to traders issuing cancels without back pressure to manipulate the market.
TL;DR
Run your wallet on physical hardware you control and DON’T share with others and DO NOT run a web browser on the same machine. Hardware wallets do not seem to be affected by these bugs but great care should be taken where they are accessed.
Decred’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 competition designed to discover alternate uses for the Politeia codebase. Competitors will use Politeia source code to address alternate use cases besides a public proposal system and then demonstrate how they work. Decred will choose the best of these on February 10th, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency in Austin, TX. The event starts at 8 PM CST, ends at 12 AM CST, and is free to attend. Drinks and food will be available for purchase.
Competitors are encouraged to work in teams but may work independently. …
Rather 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 data Politeia, which is based on the ancient Greek term, meaning “a system of government”. Politeia is a system for storing off-chain data that is both versioned and timestamped, essentially “git, a popular revision control system, plus timestamping”. Instead of attempting to store all the data related to Decred’s governance on-chain, we have opted to create an off-chain store of data that is anchored into Decred’s blockchain, minimizing its on-chain footprint. While we will use it …
As 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. This disintermediates the exchange process between cryptocurrencies that support these swap transactions. We have created some simple prototype tools under the atomicswap repository, dcratomicswap, btcatomicswap and ltcatomicswap, to allow Decred, Bitcoin and Litecoin users to swap between DCR, BTC and LTC using on-chain atomic swaps. These tools were built for those who we have the means at hand to disintermediate the exchange process: transaction script and OP_CLTV support. It is worth noting …