Monero Monday Missives

October 20th, 2014

Hello, and welcome to our fifteenth Monero Monday Missive!

Major Updates

1. We are saddened to hear of the implosion of Moolah and how it has hampered Monero users in their attempts to withdraw funds held on MintPal. We have actively reached out to the current management staff to try and assist them with Monero withdrawals, and at this stage we're completely unsure as to what the internal state of their system is. We hope and trust they will resolve it and all affected users will be able to withdraw, and we remain completely available to assist their staff as necessary.

2. It has been a week of fundamentals. Whilst externally visible development is fun and easy to see, there is a dire need to focus on some of the core issues that have been lagging. The longer we wait before addressing these, the harder and more expensive it will be to address them. By spending a little bit of effort now we make Monero more secure and robust for the far future!

3. Excellent progress has been made with an initial blockchain database implementation. The first implementation is using the Lightning Memory-Mapped Database, or LMDB, which is the same high-performance database used by OpenLDAP. We are hopeful that this initial release will be ready for limited testing by next week. You can read more about LMDB here: http://symas.com/mdb/ (it would appear they're in a competition with us for the best looking website of 1995). We are quite confident that this will be the most performant embedded database option for our workloads, but we will be adding additional implementations and comparing their performance going forward.

4. Extensive work is underway with the assistance of NLnet Labs (the creators of Unbound and libunbound) to correctly implement DNSSEC trust anchors in a cross-platform manner. Don't worry, you aren't expected to understand that sentence:) What this means is that it prepares us for more widespread, secure use of the OpenAlias standard. One of the key problems it solves is in allowing all Monero users to securely and safely determine whether an alias has been tampered with or not (although even insecure aliases can still receive payments as long as the sender double-checks and confirms it).

5. To build on what we mentioned last week: we are working directly with Kitware founder Bill Hoffman, along with his colleague Ben Boeckel, to bring our build system (which uses Kitware's CMake and CTest) up to scratch and ensure we are complying with Kitware's best-practices across the board. This may seem like an insignificant effort, but after the difficulties and pain-points we encountered with statically building the Monero 0.8.8.5 release we realised the need for our build environment to be reworked to conform to what Kitware recommends, especially considering the amount of poorly implemented CMake in the reference code we started with.

Dev Diary

Core: per-kb fee testing is going well on testnet, although there are some caveats we are working through.

Core: work is progressing nicely on a new feature that will allow a raw, static blockchain to be generated so that we can provide that for download instead of the serialised blockchain objects. This will mean that importing this file will take as many as several hours, but your daemon will fully verify the downloaded blockchain instead of just assuming it to be correct.

Tests: unit tests have been fixed so that they are now working, and this change is expected to be merged in the next week.

Tests: core tests are currently being worked on to bring them up to a 100% working state. The end goal of all of this is the ability to compile for release-test or debug-test, and have all tests pass, every time a new pull request is submitted.

Until next week!