Gridcoin Developer Update May 7th, 2018

Hello everyone and welcome to another Developer Update from the Gridcoin team. I'd like to remind everyone that these posts will be created every two weeks unless a wallet update is pending that week.

The last two weeks have largely been spent preparing for the next leisure release. The release would have come sooner, but some last minute additions to the staging branch were pulled in since the previous update post. Some of these pull requests have included:

• #1066 by @tomasbrod adds a bunch of new debug commands to the wallet. These include getsupervotes, exportstats, and getrecentvotes.

• #1079 by @thecharlatan merges in some code used in Bitcoin Core that separates bitcoinrpc into three components:

  • rpcserver: bitcoind RPC server
  • rpcclient: bitcoin-cli RPC client
  • rpcprotocol: shared common HTTP/JSON-RPC protocol code

  This should result in faster RPC calls and JSON parsing.

• #1081 by @ifoggz pulls in another change from Bitcoin Core, this time to speed up processing of the listunspent command. Bitcoin Core reported a 20% speed improvement with this code change and we expect to see similar results in Gridcoin.

• #1074 by @jamescowens addresses issue #1075 discovered by Jim earlier in the week. The issue is that when AutoTools is used to build the client it builds two executables, the QT Wallet and the CLI Daemon. The problem is that because the QT flag is set, the resulting CLI Daemon is not functional (it does not properly daemonize). This PR fixes the issue by adding a global flag to the code that defines whether the daemon or the QT wallet is being built with AutoTools.

• #1072 by @thecharlatan intends to address an issue some exchanges are still having with their wallets by updating the minimum Boost dependency requirements for the wallet to Boost version 1.65.1 (it was previously 1.64.0).

Testnet has been working with PR #1060 which was mentioned in the last Developer Update post. I can now happily report that two superblocks have been successfully staked on testnet by Linux clients using contract forwarding. These results are extremely promising and will be a welcome addition for improved superblock stability on mainnet.

In the coming days I expect a new staging build to be ready for testnet deployment so testing will refocus soon on the PRs mentioned in this post.

While not entirely wallet related, I did want to point out some behind the scenes improvements for the https://gridcoin.us website. The site now properly redirects to HTTPS and supports TLS 1.2. Our site is now rated "A+" by SSL Labs. Thanks to our founder Rob for making these changes!

Thanks for reading this edition of the Developer Update. Expect to see another update two weeks from today (5/21), unless there is a wallet update released between now and then. If you have any comments or questions for the Gridcoin development team feel free to ask in the comments below. If I am not able to answer your question directly, I can certainly forward it to someone who can!