Dev Meeting Transcript (August 13, 2021)
[4:00 PM] Tron: ————————
[4:01 PM] Tron: The channel is open for discussion. I'm going to close it at 3:00pm Mountain so that these discussions don't run all Friday afternoon.
[4:03 PM] Tron: ————
[4:04 PM] Tron: As you may know there are DM messages being sent through Discord suggesting that there is an upgrade for Ravencoin. This is a scam. We've seen it before.
[4:04 PM] kralverde 🇺🇸: :wave:
[4:05 PM] Tron: I've reversed the domain and IP address and tracked it to ProHoster (Russian hosting site). Thanks to Google translate, I was able to get a message to their support and request that they remove the site. I've gotten automated confirmation back that they have the support ticket, but no actual response yet.
[4:06 PM] Tron: I've put a PSA in #news, and tweeted out a warning.
[4:07 PM] kralverde 🇺🇸: Any updates on the audit and signing?
[4:11 PM] Cryptonite: Hi guys, does someone has an idea if, ravencoin community has planed to make RVN much efficient, less energy consuming and heating? because Ä° think rvn is a realy good project but after ETH 2.0 all miners will search for an alternative that they can mine, but these problemes will dissuade not just miners but major institutions as well.
[4:13 PM] kinkajou: Also have you heard back from Stably Tron ? Could we go ahead and get a proposal for the stablecoin on https://ravencoin.foundation/proposals since we know roughly what the cost will be?
Having a donation address for people to passively mine to or donate to as they see fit would be nice and would also help gauge interest better than word of mouth (which seems to be overwhelmingly positive based on my conversations over the past couple weeks)
[4:16 PM] Tron: No information on the audit (yet). In fairness, they said 2 weeks and it has been 1.3ish.
[4:17 PM] Tron: Yes, the approval for the signing key is done. They've sent it – snail mail and it has not arrived yet. Weird, but I think they're using that to verify the physical address.
[4:17 PM] Biz: Hello! I saw on Twitter that there is interest in adding LN/segwit support to Ravencoin. I am interested in doing this work, as I am actively doing similar review/fixes upon LN with CHIPS (KMD ecosystem). Chips uses segwit by default
[4:17 PM] Biz: If there is an opportunity for funded work in this regard, I would be happy to meet with VCs next week to discuss as well
[4:18 PM] Tron: Stably has sent me a MNDA which I'm still reviewing.
[4:19 PM] Tron: Biz Let's start the conversation here.
[4:19 PM] Tron: Segwit would allow a lightning network to be built as a second layer. If we build it, we'd obviously want asset support included.
[4:20 PM] Tron: Since you have some experience Biz with this. What do you think it would take? (time & funding)?
[4:22 PM] Biz: When you say asset support included, you mean tokens upon raven?
[4:23 PM] Tron: Yes.
[4:23 PM] Biz: For that full extent, I can’t give an accurate timeline without looking under the hood further. Segwit would be a first step yes. Could be done as two separate projects as a result
[4:23 PM] Biz: As we work through the segwit stuff, I’ll gain some familiarity to know more precisely how possible the LN assets are
[4:24 PM] Biz: Segwit will also require a hardfork
[4:24 PM] Tron: For example, we inherited P2SH from Bitcoin code but it didn't work for assets. We'd want lightning/segwit support for assets.
[4:25 PM] Cryptonite: Guys can Ä° say something? maybe before making tokens upon raven, have you think about raven efficiency?
[4:25 PM] Biz: How heavily was your P2SH modified to accommodate the assets? Can you provide some links where I can research what was done? I.e. specific commits?
[4:25 PM] Biz: Not needed immediately, general gist is fine
[4:25 PM] kinkajou: An issue for SegWit has been submitted here: https://github.com/RavenProject/Ravencoin/issues/979
Would be nice to get a proposal going for this on the foundation site as well once we figure out cost.
[4:26 PM] Biz: Yes, I did read that. I looked at your existing proposals, and my price would generally be on-par with two separate projects. Maybe slightly higher depending on how much of testing/formal code review falls on me rather than raven team.
[4:26 PM] Tron: The ISE proposal just came in. Their ears must've been burning. $28K.
[4:27 PM] brianmct: https://ravencoin.org/assets is a good place to start for technical info about assets @Biz
Ravencoin
Assets
A peer-to-peer blockchain designed to handle the efficient creation and transfer of assets from one party to another. It’s an open-source project based on Bitcoin
[4:27 PM] Biz: Cost would be under that, certainly
[4:28 PM] Biz: (Without support for assets, but maybe depending on how much additional is needed)
[4:28 PM] Tron: Sorry, mixing two things. We've been requesting a bid for a security audit for all the other code (that hasn't been audited as part of the P2SH code audit), and the bid just came in.
[4:29 PM] Biz: Understood. To be fair, the auditing costs I would consider severable from raw implementation costs. This is what I meant when I said this: depending on how much testing/formal review falls on me rather than raven team
[4:30 PM] Tron: Asset transactions are just Ravencoin transactions with additional data in what you would know as OP_RETURN, but we have special OP code for Asset transactions. P2SH added some complications because the P2PK transactions assumed some fixed sizes.
[4:30 PM] Cryptonite: Ä° mean we must to do something to optimize the algorithme to make raven using less energy and less heat. With the environmental movement becoming more and more important, we should make mining more eco-friendly if we want to have the support of the people.
[4:31 PM] Tron: The expectation is to have some unit tests and functional tests. The testing framework is identical to Bitcoin's framework. There will obviously be other eyes looking at it, and a formal security audit (paid separately).
[4:32 PM] Sevvy: The algorithm is designed to make a gpu run at basically max utilization so that an ASIC would have to look a lot like a gpu and lose its advantage. What you're describing is a feature not a flaw
[4:32 PM] Sevvy: I'm a layperson but that is my understanding
[4:33 PM] Sevvy: The last time we changed our algorithm it was held by many that it would be the last time. onwards
[4:33 PM] Tron: Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Proof-of-work uses energy up to the point that there is diminishing incentives. Let's say we made KAWPOW 90% more efficient (10x the # of hashes per unit of energy on any given hardware). Then 10x more people would start mining it and the difficulty adjustment would compensate in real-time to make sure blocks (and reward) come out at 1 minute intervals.
[4:36 PM] Tron: On the plus side (in the short term) there is a lot of buzz around Ravencoin as Ethereum started burning fees, and the London fork will switch to POS. This puts Ravencoin in the pole position for miners and all the exposure (mind share) that comes with that.
[4:38 PM] Biz: That sounds manageable. I’ve been working with scripting at great length in both BTC & XMR worlds lately. Sounds simple enough in theory
[4:39 PM] Tron: The code should look familiar. Asset code is separated into its own area, and most of the BTC code stayed the same (as it was in Oct 2017). With the exception of critical fixes that were made along the way.
[4:40 PM] kinkajou: Proof-of-work essentially just converts energy into currency. Ravencoin's algorithm is designed so that commodity hardware can perform this proof-of-work with relative certainty that specialized hardware will not be manufactured later to centralize hashrate. The algorithm does not explicitly prevent this, but makes it economically infeasible to do so.
In that regard, RVN's algorithm is already fairly eco friendly since the network is not dominated by farms of thousands upon thousands of high-powered single function ASICs that will become scrap in a few years. Cryptonite
[4:41 PM] Sevvy: Well said. Esp on the e waste issue
[4:45 PM] Tron: Biz If you want to DM me and give me an idea of what it would cost, we can set up a bounty on the issue.
[4:45 PM] Biz: Nice. Sounds like I will be familiar. Have worked extensively with 0.16.0 codebase and more recently 0.21.0
[4:46 PM] Tron: It's not a rush, and security is our primary concern.
[4:46 PM] Tron: Here's a link to the Ravencoin ISE proposal
[4:47 PM] Biz: Awesome, that’s very helpful. Will definitely follow up over DM once I have a deeper look at things. I could spout numbers without some self-education but that helps no one 😉
[4:48 PM] Biz: I’ll follow up by beginning of next week.
[4:50 PM] kinkajou: I believe P2SH was community-funded within a matter of hours so I don't imagine you will need to speak with any VCs :stuck_out_tongue:
[4:53 PM] Cryptonite: I understand what you mean and you are right in some sense. but economically infeasible is relative, because I think that if raven takes such a value as bitcoin, there will be people ready to invest in ASÄ°C. And if we count that the raven does not rise too much in value for it remains uninteresting, it is counterproductive. Don't you think?
[4:54 PM] Biz: I would propose a bounty structure payed out in 3 waves. 1/3 to commence work, 1/3 at halfway, 1/3 at full deliver.
[4:54 PM] Biz: This ensures both sides have some assurances
[4:54 PM] Tron: The rise in RVN value promotes a simultaneous rise in security, which justifies its value. It is a positive feedback loop.
[4:56 PM] kinkajou: The thing is – why would one invest tens/hundreds of millions of dollars and years of time into R&D and manufacturing on hardware that's only ~40% better when you could just buy GPU? That is an awful lot of time and money for a marginal gain – and for all they know we could just fork them off again rendering their entire investment worthless.
[4:56 PM] Tron: Anyone can create an ASIC, because that just means they've built something that ONLY does KAWPOW. But, because of the nature of KAWPOW, the custom hardware will be similar to a video card, but without the manufacturing scale that AMD and NVidia have. It is unlikely to have a significant advantage.
[4:57 PM] Vincent: With everyone not happy about the previous audits, why do we continue..?
[4:58 PM] Hans_Schmidt: I do not expect asset support to have significant impact on Segwit code. P2SH was impacted by assets in a major way because P2SH and its associated Redeem scripts are ScriptPubKey related code, and Ravencoin's asset scripting is appended to the ScriptPubKeys on outputs. Segwit is primarily about the ScriptSigs on inputs, which are the same in Ravencoin as in Bitcoin.
The bigger issue is that Bitcoin has had close to 15000 commits since Ravencoin forked, including a lot of code refactoring, so I expect that the Segwit support will have to be written for Ravencoin mostly from scratch.
The important aspect of Segwit is not in just setting up a bounty but in the unit and functional tests to make sure that the solution works and didn't break anything else. We have already had bounty projects which were paid out and the code ended up being reverted because it ended up being unusable.
I am all in favor of Segwit and of engaging new devs to the project. But we need to make sure that we define and test the bounty projects better than we have done in the past.
[5:01 PM] Cryptonite: you mean, the higher the raven value, the more miners there will be to secure the network, but this is the case for all PoW cryptos. or did you mean something else?
[5:05 PM] Biz: This sounds fairly probable. It’s also why I proposed the payment schedule. Allows for amendment or pausing, as necessary. I’m not in the business of shipping non-secure code, but recognize others are. Happy to do the extra work for extra funding in shoring up security
[5:06 PM] Biz: Chips was running segwit on 0.16.0 codebase, but LN required an upgrade to 0.21.0
[5:06 PM] Biz: Been fixing bugs in backend/API as they arose in a bounty they paid out for upgrade
[5:06 PM] Tron: That's a legit question. It's hard to evaluate. Let's say that the devs are so good that nothing of significance is found. That's a great thing. Or, alternatively, the evaluation isn't thorough enough and there are security issues that were glossed over. How do we know which it is? My view is that any additional review is worth it unless we have reason to believe that they will not be able to find anything – because of incompetence or inappropriate methodology. I have asked that they provide a list of what and how they evaluate, and not just a "we didn't find nuthin' report'.
[5:08 PM] Biz: Sounds like the OP_RETURN strategy won’t have a very large impact on segwit compat. Way extension was gone about at RVN sounds good for the upgrade
[5:09 PM] Biz: Upgrading codebase to a higher version will require some heavy review, however. Particularly if jumping from 0.16.0 to 0.21.0 as my recent work. That code won’t enter production until October
[5:09 PM] Biz: Very okay with clearly defining scope, deliverables, and timeline as a result, on my end.
[5:10 PM] Vincent: Not being a coder, i don't know the details but many devs had called the last one worthless… but … what do i know…
[5:10 PM] Hans_Schmidt: Ravencoin's bitcoin codebase is even a bit older than that. But your attitude sounds encouraging. Welcome to the project. Look forward to working together.
[5:11 PM] Biz: Hardly in the business of quick and dirty bounties, as others often are. More so interested in collaboration and a steady work beat.
[5:11 PM] Biz: Looking forward to what opportunities may be uncovered here as well :slight_smile: great to get acquainted with you all
[5:16 PM] Tron: Thanks Biz . And welcome.
[5:17 PM] Tron: I'm going to close the channel. Thanks to everyone for participating. As always you can reach me here, or via e-mail [tron@ravencoin.foundation](mailto:tron@ravencoin.foundation)
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