Dev Meeting Transcript (June 11, 2021)

[3:56 PM] brianmct: Channel opened for development meeting!

[3:58 PM] WhaleStreet: Hi :wave:

[4:02 PM] kinkajou: Hello

[4:02 PM] Hedger: Hi

[4:02 PM] Tron: Hi

[4:03 PM] fdov: hi.

[4:06 PM] Tron: We don't seem to have a kawwardinator.

[4:07 PM] Tron: I've purchased a EV Code Signing Certificate for Ravencoin Foundation for 3 years. It is still in the approval (information verification) process.

[4:10 PM] brianmct: nice! I remember at a previous meeting there was discussion about the Foundation hosting some Electrum servers, has there been any progress on that front?

[4:11 PM] brianmct: I also want to plug Ben 's Raven Trader app for atomic swaps, been using it all week and it's been awesome 🙂

[4:12 PM] brianmct: now that it's out I think we can explore getting it integrated with other wallets; I think a major painpoint in the process right now is having to have a Raven Core wallet set up with RPC; I've had quite a few people ask for help with setting that up

[4:13 PM] Tron: Yes. I spun up a server in Digital Ocean and gave HyperPeek credentials for it.

[4:13 PM] Hans_Schmidt: HyperPeek told me yesterday that he has access now to 1 VM hosted by the Foundation. It will host raven-qty mainnet + testnet and Electrum mainnet+testnet. He's in the process of working out the ports and also waiting for just a bit more Electrum testing.

[4:14 PM] fdov: Tron do you control the DNS seeds for main and testnet? – They might need updating, the ones for testnet does not work at all.

[4:16 PM] fdov: Currently they just make it worse, as they reply with addresses that does not work. Not replying would be better.

[4:17 PM] Tron: I control only the backup domains. The semi-permanent IP addresses can (and should) be added directly to the code. Those are the primary now, so that there isn't a single attack vector (DNS records). If you'll send me IP addresses, I can add them to the backup DNS.

[4:17 PM] fdov: I completely disagree.

[4:17 PM] fdov: DNS is way easier to update.

[4:17 PM] fdov: Espesically with 2 years between releases.

[4:17 PM] Tron: Easier to update, and therefore easier to influence.

[4:18 PM] fdov: Yeah, or we can have something that does not work. Like we have now.

[4:18 PM] Tron: Are we talking about testnet or mainnet?

[4:19 PM] fdov: mainnet works, testnet does not.

[4:19 PM] Tron: To my knowledge, the testnet IP records have not been updated in the code.

[4:20 PM] fdov: I've made PRs to update the hardcoded seeds for testnet, but they will not activate if it gets replies from DNS-seeds. So I made a PR to add the hardcoded ones if less than 5 addresses are found from dns (currently it replies with 4).

[4:21 PM] fdov: All this could be fixed instantly with updating a zone-file.

[4:22 PM] fdov: If we want the hardcoded ones to be primary, the code should reflect it. Currently DNS is primary for testnet. I have not looked at main.

[4:25 PM] Tron: I think we do want hardcoded ones to be primary. It is my understanding (but I could be wrong) that hard-coded IPs are used first, then domains. We took out the hard-coded IPs from Bitcoin (originally) because there was no Ravencoin network. They were only recently put back in as an effort to further distribute the network (less reliance on controlled seed nodes).

[4:26 PM] Hans_Schmidt: Security best practice debate aside, I'm not sure I understood the conclusion- is there any reason we can't keep the DNS up to date?

[4:27 PM] Tron: No reason at all. Send me IPs (designated as testnet or mainnet) and I'll get them in.

[4:27 PM] Hans_Schmidt: Thanks. I agree that hardcoded is better security. DNS helps performance if the IPs get stale.

[4:29 PM] fdov: The ones from chainparamsseeds.h in the develop branch is a good start.

[4:30 PM] Tron: It looks like there is just 2. Do you have them in decimal form?

[4:31 PM] Ben: brianmct Sorry for not responding earlier, i agree on the thoughts about needing to enable rpc. I'm gonna be working on direct integration soon hopefully

[4:32 PM] fdov: Tron wrong branch, switch to develop. I don't have the list in decimal, no.

[4:32 PM] Tron: 2 of the domains are updated via Terraform, and 1 of them is manually updated.

[4:33 PM] Tron: Ok, I'll decode them.

[4:33 PM] Hans_Schmidt: Sounds like we should check the code and made sure hard-coded IPs are primary and DNS secondary.

[4:34 PM] Hans_Schmidt: with Electrum?

[4:35 PM] HyperPeek: Hi all! We can also run a testnet seed on the server Tron gave me login to (thanks :-)) I plan to run both, mainnet and testnet for server and electrum. Server should be totally sufficient

[4:35 PM] Ben: Electrum likely first

[4:36 PM] Hans_Schmidt: Excellent- so it is a special-purpose thin client!

[4:36 PM] Ben: Yup, normal txs for all intents and purposes

[4:37 PM] HyperPeek: And its python, so should be straight forward to implement…

[4:37 PM] fdov: Hans_Schmidt Yes. I'm pretty sure DNS is primary for testnet, I checked this when I made PR #1042

[4:37 PM] Tron: I'll add the IP to testnet and mainnet with the assumption that it'll do both.

[4:37 PM] HyperPeek: Great! If not, I let you know.

[4:38 PM] Ben: You could even load some of the same dialogs in electrum lol

[4:38 PM] HyperPeek: Yes. Just add a tab…

[4:38 PM] HyperPeek: Its working great btw :slight_smile:

[4:39 PM] Ben: Thanks 🙂

[4:41 PM] Hans_Schmidt: It's awesome how far Electrum has come in such a short time (thanks kralverde )- and now we're discussing an atomic swap tab:heart_eyes:

[4:41 PM] Ben: Yes, thank you kralverde !

[4:42 PM] kralverde: Definately want to add atomic swaps soon

[4:43 PM] Ben: Needs asset send support first 🙂

[4:43 PM] Ben: No pressure 😉

[4:45 PM] HyperPeek: That can't be far given kralverdes speed :joy: Incredible progress.

[4:46 PM] Hans_Schmidt: I want to also give credit that the Electrum work is producing good synergy with the raven-qt work because having a 2nd engine parsing the chain and producing lists of weird things on mainnet history has been very educational.

[4:48 PM] HyperPeek: Yes definitely. Learned a lot over that last weeks what you can put on the chain that no one ever thought of. And good finding from Hans to close that -acceptnonstdtxn issue

[4:49 PM] HyperPeek: This definitely need to go into the next release.

[4:54 PM] Tron: I'm decoding the testnet IPs, and adding them. I will leave out any that get a connection refused via telnet.

[4:55 PM] fdov: Ideally the seeds should be running the crawler.

[4:55 PM] fdov: https://github.com/RavenProject/ravencoin-seeder

[5:01 PM] Tron: SpyderDev was working on that. My understanding is that it was used to get the mainnet IPs that we added to code and DNS.

[5:01 PM] Hans_Schmidt: I find myself thinking that this community has been doing a lot of dev work lately, but doing few releases. Kind of feels like we are about to do a batch of powerful releases soon.

[5:04 PM] fdov: Our TOR support will die in about a month. So if anyone is up for the task of making TorV3 work..

[5:06 PM] Tron: Why? Is TOR deprecating something?

[5:06 PM] fdov: https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline

Onion Service version 2 deprecation timeline | Tor Blog

From today (July 2nd, 2020), the Internet has around 16 months to migrate from onion services v2 to v3 once and for all.

[5:08 PM] Hans_Schmidt: Is there any way to get a usage statistic? Does anyone use it? How long does THAT take to sync?

[5:08 PM] Tron: Interesting. Does anyone here know if Bitcoin has made the changes to be V3 compatible?

[5:08 PM] fdov: Yes, they have.

[5:09 PM] fdov: It's not a simple merge back to ravencoin, as bitcoin is nothing like ravencoin anymore.

[5:10 PM] fdov: I had a quick look at the dash implementation, could be easier. Not sure. (https://github.com/dashpay/dash/pull/4025)

[5:11 PM] HyperPeek: Hmm — does not look straight forward…

[5:12 PM] HyperPeek: As Hans said — lets find out if its used and if we need it put a bounty on it maybe…

[5:13 PM] Hans_Schmidt: I didn't see it on Dogecoin… Didn't keep them from being #6 :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

[5:14 PM] fdov: They rebrand new bitcoin releases when they upgrade.

[5:14 PM] Hans_Schmidt: what does that mean?

[5:15 PM] fdov: Instead of merging back everything, they start over with bitcoin 0.21.x and reimplement doge on that.

[5:15 PM] Tron: I added an issue for TOR V3.

[5:16 PM] Tron: Decoded IPs for testnet

[5:16 PM] Tron:

{{0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xff,0xff,0x36,0xbf,0x8f,0xad}, 18770}, 54.191.143.173 (refused)

{{0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xff,0xff,0x12,0x74,0x3e,0x91}, 18770}, 18.116.62.145

{{0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xff,0xff,0x90,0x5b,0x66,0x9b}, 18770}, 144.91.102.155

{{0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xff,0xff,0xa8,0x77,0x64,0x8c}, 18770}, 168.119.100.140

{{0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xff,0xff,0x53,0xf3,0xbf,0xc7}, 18770}, 83.243.191.199

{{0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xff,0xff,0x23,0xa8,0x17,0x4c}, 18770}, 35.168.23.76 (not live)

{{0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0xff,0xff,0x53,0xcd,0x97,0xb7}, 18770} 83.205.151.183 (refused)

[5:16 PM] HyperPeek: So 4 — which is not bad. 4th is mine, will try to keep it up.

[5:17 PM] fdov: That's pretty good, 4/7 – i just picked them from the peers of my testnet node ~10 days ago.

[5:21 PM] Hans_Schmidt: That's interesting. I was recently thinking about how much effort it would be to reimplement Ravencoin's feature set on top of the latest bitcoin release. It's a big job, but might be the best way to catch up to bitcoin someday. We haven't done anything fundamentally incompatible.

[5:24 PM] Tron: Just FYI. ISE was paid $19,600 yesterday to do the security audit.

[5:26 PM] fdov: What branch/commit etc. will that be?

[5:27 PM] Tron: Whatever we want. They haven't started yet.

[5:28 PM] HyperPeek: Ok, then maybe lets merge the p2sh fix and they should go from there. Could do a tag / branch

[5:28 PM] Hans_Schmidt: develop+PR1019?

[5:28 PM] fdov: Yes.

[5:28 PM] HyperPeek: Or the few other pending PR on top as well — should not matter.

[5:29 PM] fdov: Should we make a review branch?

[5:30 PM] fdov: or merge 1019 to develop and give them the commit hash?

[5:30 PM] HyperPeek: Depends if we /they do interactive work. If not a hash is fine, otherwise I'd say a branch is perfect.

[5:32 PM] Tron: A branch seems best. And a list of areas of focus.

[5:32 PM] Tron: I noticed there was a change to wallet.cpp that impacts the key generation. What was the impetus for the change?

[5:34 PM] Hans_Schmidt: Was that the deprecated random_shuffle function? I don't think we merged yet. deprecated in c++17

[5:35 PM] Tron: Ah, OK.

[5:35 PM] HyperPeek: One change was revert of p2sh for merge to master. Then we put it back

[5:35 PM] fdov: We can do loads of scripted diffs to fix old code style if we want.

[5:36 PM] fdov: But the review-job is not so cool.

[5:37 PM] HyperPeek: Definitely :joy: Without digging deep you need some level of trust…

[5:37 PM] HyperPeek: Luckely I came across the random stuff before, but other might be tricky…

[5:37 PM] fdov: I think we should include that too. in the review.

[5:38 PM] fdov: Because it fixes compile on freebsd and osx.

[5:38 PM] HyperPeek: Ahh yes..

[5:38 PM] Tron: I'll flag that for review.

[5:38 PM] Tron: I added 3 of the 4 testnet seed nodes to the dashboard (page 3).

[5:39 PM] Tron: https://status.ravencoin.foundation/

[5:39 PM] Hans_Schmidt: Good idea. I had no reason to not approve it, but I have been delaying because edits to random number generation make me nervous

[5:39 PM] HyperPeek: Apart from that — audit focus would be original p2sh + 1019.

[5:39 PM] HyperPeek: ?

[5:42 PM] Tron: Generically anything that could break consensus, cause a fork, impact signing, or affect wallet security. Special emphasis on p2sh.

[5:42 PM] Hans_Schmidt: I think it's ok to merge every PR <= PR1060 except PR1031 and then create a new branch for the audit

[5:43 PM] HyperPeek: Ok, I am fine with that too

[5:44 PM] HyperPeek: Would be cleanest imo

[5:45 PM] HyperPeek: So feel free to approve and merge :slight_smile:

[5:45 PM] Tron: I'll reach out when I have more on the timetable from ISE.

[5:46 PM] fdov: I agree, 1031 just sits there waiting for bitcoin to merge. It could be the reason for some rare random crashes.

[5:47 PM] HyperPeek: I checked their conversation — already approved, so probably merged soon

[5:47 PM] Hans_Schmidt: yea, I've seen things in the log that look like that, but it's very rare and flaky

[5:47 PM] fdov: It is.

[5:48 PM] Hans_Schmidt: So we will probably want it for our release, but doesn't matter for the audit

[5:48 PM] fdov: So, should we make test2 binaries this weekend?

[5:50 PM] fdov: If you are OK with 1019 I can make the binaries tomorrow. I really want the next test binaries to work on mainnet and testnet.

[5:51 PM] HyperPeek: Anything left on your test-matrix, Hans? I am pretty confident it behaves like 4.3.2.1 now pre-activation.

[5:51 PM] Hans_Schmidt: Agreed. I've been beating it to death as I know you and others have. Let's invite more people to the party for testing.

[5:52 PM] Tron: If we have some non-signed binaries and we just want testers, let me know and I'll put out a call.

[5:53 PM] HyperPeek: We call it 4.7.0 test2?

[5:54 PM] fdov: Yes, I think that makes sense.

[5:55 PM] Jeroz: Not sure if I missed it but was there any update on stably.io? I think it would be very nice if we could make swaps from and to fiat. @Tron

[5:57 PM] Tron: I still owe an answer to stably.io. They've modified their proposal to include open-sourcing all the parts of the stack that they build.

[5:58 PM] Tron: They want about $120K. That was easier a few months ago.

[5:59 PM] Hans_Schmidt: The money goes to them, or into some type of escrow to fund the stablecoin?

[6:00 PM] Tron: That included development, and market making. So, I guess some of both.

[6:00 PM] Tron: I'll get their new proposal and let everyone review it.

[6:01 PM] Jeroz: what does market making include? trade volume? where?

[6:01 PM] fdov: Hans_Schmidtu/HyperPeek If you merge to develop, I made PR 1063, which can be the "final" merge before the binaries. – It updates to test2.

[6:02 PM] Tron: I don't know the details. The stablecoin is backed 1:1 and stored at a custodian — I think PrimeTrust, but the market making helps springboard the liquidity.

[6:03 PM] Jeroz: I see. Well im not sure if thats needed. I do think that it would be a very good addition to funding e.g., token sales using on chain swaps.

[6:05 PM] Hans_Schmidt: The details really matter as you know. I know that many people are skeptical of spending money, but stablecoins really help a crypto ecosystem. There are some cost numbers at which it would be worthwhile, Depends on the details

[6:05 PM] brianmct: is there a document / blog post explaining the proposal somewhere?

[6:06 PM] Jeroz: ^

[6:07 PM] brianmct: oops I can't read :sweat_smile:

[6:08 PM] Tron: I have an original which I couldn't share at the time because the asset hadn't been reserved. The new proposal will be significantly different with the open-source pieces being given back to the Ravencoin community. I'll try and get their new proposal and post it.

[6:08 PM] Jeroz: thanks

[6:08 PM] Hans_Schmidt: I gotta go. Everyone have a great weekend!

[6:09 PM] brianmct: sounds good; if it's a matter of reserving the assets it should be easy to come up with funds to mint the necessary asset names

[6:09 PM] Tron: I'll close the channel. Thanks everyone. You have 60 seconds to get any last words in.

[6:11 PM] HyperPeek: Oops too late… :slight_smile:

[6:11 PM] fdov: Good meeting, thanks. Have a nice weekend.

[6:11 PM] Tron: Oh, the 5 IPs for seed-testnet-raven.<domain> have been updated on all three domains.