A 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 progress on the roadmap:

• Convert Decred into a stakeholder-directed DAO
  • Hard fork voting - Complete, In production
  • Public proposal system - Work-in-progress, ETA late Q3 2017
  • Decentralized control of DHG funds - Work-in-progress, ETA early Q1 2018
• Lightning Network support - Work-in-progress, ETA Q4 2017
• Improved GUI wallets - Work-in-progress, ETA early Q4 2017
• RFP process change - Complete, In production
• Presence at events - Work-in-progress, talks in Q3 and Q4 2017
• Enhanced privacy - …

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Over 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 the immediate future. Since Decred has a steadily accumulating development subsidy at a rate of DCR 21,456 per month, as of June 2017, this means there is roughly USD 430,000 available per month for project-related expenditures. Currently, we are spending approximately USD 100,000 per month on development, marketing and design, which is less than 25% of the current development subsidy rate. In order to accelerate the development of Decred infrastructure, we are aiming to spend most or all of …

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Per the 2017 Decred Roadmap, one of the major deliverables is a proposal system that allows users to participate in the governance of Decred. The proposal system will have 2 main components: a blockchain-based timestamping service and a public version-controlled repository for proposal data. The subject of this entry is dcrtime, the timestamping component. Dcrtime was written by Marco Peereboom over the past couple months and is the result of collaboration between Marco, Jake Yocom-Piatt and Dave Collins. The primary motivation for dcrtime is the desire for the proposal system to have maximum transparency and accountability, while having a minimal onchain footprint. In terms of its onchain footprint and overall design, dcrtime draws on …

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Lightning 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 smart contracts, the details of how it works are, unsurprisingly, complex. To make LN more tangible from a non-technical perspective, we will view it through the lens of practical engineering considerations and the concepts that drive those considerations.

The utility of LN is driven by several major considerations in the context of cryptocurrencies:

• low-latency payments - Many potential use cases for a modern system of transmitting value require a low latency, e.g. point-of-sale purchases. …

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The 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 proposed to address the various issues that have come up with the stake difficulty (“sdiff” for short) since launch in February 2016. Decred launched with a sdiff algorithm that accomplished its basic design goal, which was to keep the ticket pool near its target size, but we have come to recognize several shortcomings and problems with the existing algorithm that were not apparent until it went into production use. The main problem is that a single interval where all the tickets are purchased leads …

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