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.
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 …
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 …