Monero Monday Missives

November 24th, 2014

Hello, and welcome to our nineteenth Monero Monday Missive!

Major Updates

1. It is with great pride that we announce the very first Monero hosted account service (a web wallet for Monero, if you will), which we are certain will provide a level of accessibility that was previously unknown with Monero. My Monero is managed by Riccardo "fluffypony" Spagni, although it was created through the efforts and hard work of many people including members of the Monero Core Team, Lucas Jones, Matthew Little, and seed funding provided by Risto Pietila. All of the heavy lifting is done client-side, which means that My Monero can never spend your funds on your behalf or without your authorisation. However, there is a small compromise in that the server knows your view key, which is necessary in order for it to identify transactions belonging to you. Thus there is some reduction in transactional privacy when using My Monero, as if the service is compromised your view key would be revealed. That having been said, stealth addresses would still be in effect even if the server was compromised, and thus transactions can still be said to be unlinkable. If you are truly concerned about absolute transactional privacy, then running your own Monero node will always be the preferred route.

1. Significant progress has been made to fixing the last few Windows build issues. KitWare have worked with us ensuring that our CMake is 100% up to their best practices, and the resulting 2 905 lines of new CMake (!!!) is evidence thereof: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/pull/180/files. Now that we are seeing light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, we expect to tidy this up by the end of the week and can finally tag-and-release Monero 0.8.8.5.

2. We are working hard on solving the blockchain DB bugs as and where they are found. If all goes well we should have enough of the nuances worked out to have it merged into master within the next 4 weeks.

3. We have seen our QA (automated testing) / CI (Continuous Integration) / Gitian build efforts drag their heels extremely slowly over the past few months, mostly due to specialists in those fields originally interested in helping us finally not being able to commit to any significant period of assistance. We are stepping this up a notch with the assistance of a new contributor, Gazby in #monero-dev, who will focus on the devops work.

Dev Diary

Core: msys2 now successfully compiles static releases in PR 180, final testing of new builds will happen this week

Core: expect a mass merge of PRs previously waiting this week. If you have a PR with CMake changes in it expect it to be merged and fixed manually, but moving forward CMake changes will have to comply with the new, cleaner CMake.

Until next week!