Tech Update:
https://rchain.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/1269661697/Community+Update+131
Ethereum Silicon Valley Meetup w Greg – Aug 28: https://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/events/
Jeff Flowers – Decentralization Foundation: https://d24n.org
Staking inquiries: staking@rchain.coop
Transcript:
Greg Meredith 00:00
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy. And we have quite a few things to talk about today. So let’s go ahead and get started and have Rao give the tech update.
Rao Bhamidipati 00:15
So we have 09.25.1 running on the main net observer nodes and the exchange notes and we’re in the process of updating the validator nodes on the main net, also 09.25.1 and we’ll be putting out the release notes shortly. And everything else the test net is already running the 09.25.1 final version. Last week when we talked about this, we were running actually pre release or release candidate off 09.25.1 but we had a couple of PR’s since then. And those are all in and tested and we were adding some tests last time we spoke about this. So I’ll just show you the list of the pr’s is about a total of 22 pr’s. The earliest ones of course, we talked about as being the main content to improve the network, using the constructs we put in for last finalized state. So this PR completes much of the last finalized state work, we still have some work left to do. That’s part of the content. That’s the content for 09.26. We had quite a few bug fixes in this release, all these here, and then we had improvements on the on GRPC, because sometimes it hangs so we got that fixed. The quite a quite a bit of using lmdb sort of more extensively, but also in a much more modular fashion right now so that there are not any locks that are not necessary. And so we are trying to minimize the lock so that the network can proceed at at a better pace. So those are some of the sort of summary version of what’s in those pr’s. And the 09.26 will be the last finalized state completion along with either some more partial, probably partial refactoring of the runtime manager, but in between, we will probably do a small release on or 09.25.2 is what we’re calling it right now. It’s not tagged on any pr’s at the moment, yet But what this is, is just because we’re getting close to the end of the current epoch, and we’re going to be unbo nding, the validators and the current validators. And then bonding new validators. We wanted to just run through that process a couple of times, do tests or improve the number of tests on that and make sure that everything is working fine. So that’s one big part of that. 09.25.2, and then the couple of security bugs that we want to take care of. Along with that we ran we have we looked into the dependencies that we’re looking to update the dependencies. This is the other libraries or the libraries that the code base is currently using. would not necessarily going to address this 0.9.25.2, but we are reviewing it You know, some of them are simple enough, some of them may need a lot more analysis, and even extensive testing to make sure that everything with the newer versions of the libraries is working as intended. So we’re starting that work will probably knock off whatever we can easily knock off. And but we may take some time at some point, perhaps after 0.9.26. And the last finalized release is complete, we’ll take some time to resolve the dependencies in a more substantive fashion. So that’s kind of where we are with 0.9.25.2, which is the next. It’s kind of targeted to be kind of early next week, and then the 0.9.26. And then I don’t want to talk too much into the future at this point about What all we’ll be doing but that’s let’s just stick with 0.9.26 at least you understand what the plan is up to on 0.9.26 in terms of the continuous integration or network environment, we have set up now additional number of validator nodes and the in the next epoch, the intention is to have up to 20 validator nodes, so there will be a much larger number than now. And we have the new nodes that we will be needing for the next epoch on IBM, the IBM network in multiple IBM cloud in multiple regions. So, that’s still ongoing, we may have to add a few more nodes to that. In terms of tech governance last week, we reviewed the whatever issues we were not able to get to the previous week. We reviewed them, and we also updated the relative priority of those issues, at least a good number of them. And there are now some issues identified for a kind of Greg to participate with the group, maybe tomorrow. As it turns out, many of the way back issues that the put in the RChip repository, meaning the development team at the time, put some seven or so issues in there, and they all relate to network security. You know, kind of how many validators Do you need for X number of blocks, how much stake Do you need for X number of blocks, things like that, that were not resolved. So those all tie into, in general the conversation about network security. And the economics are the various participants in the network, and how how they interact, to either improve or hurt the security of the network and decentralization of the network. So we identified that as a potential set of things that we do need to address and this is going to be much of the content of conversation with Greg in this tech governance session. And we but separately, we were also looking at the there’s a strategy working group that was working on what You know, the items that needed to be put together from a strategy perspective. And so, as a combination of all this effort, there is now an Excel model that tries to address the economics of sustainable network security and decentralization. It needs to be reviewed still internally, but we will be publishing out publishing some early version of that to the community, so that when people are talking about or making proposals, it’s better to critique the model rather than otherwise you come from individual data points, rather than the interrelationship of those data points or decisions. So that’s what the attempt with this Excel model is to try and engender that come conversation in the community to say, Okay, what all is involved? How do they interact? What does a particular decision mean? And to network security and decentralization? What does the timing of that decision look like? How does that evolve over time, as we get increased number of transactions and so on, or you know, as the price of the rev changes, or those are the kinds of things, again, the initial model is not going to be complete. But that’s why we may have a few different versions of it, but I think it’s a it’s a better base for people to play with and start start the conversation from so that the conversations are not dogmatic, but are based in some model and of course, hopefully, that that exploration and the critique would include that model. So that’s what we’re hoping for. That’s, I think mostly what I have to say. I think Darryl is going to pick up the other community activity and progress that’s going on. So with what I said so far, are there any questions? or comments? All right, over to you Greg.
Greg Meredith 10:27
Thanks. Thanks. That was great. It’s I mean, it’s it’s so encouraging to see all the progress and the stabilization in the network. Everything is is really good. Um, all right. We do have a guest on then. So before we turn things over for the community in review section with Darryl I wanted to invite Jeff flowers to introduce himself and, and tell us what’s what’s going on.
Jeff Flowers 10:58
Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for that. Intro. My name is Jeff flowers. I’m one of the CO organizers for Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup. We also have, of course, we love interesting projects and technologies. And I think we all agree that RChain certainly qualifies in that regard. And so I have the great pleasure of introducing a meetup that will include Greg, and I have the pleasure of introducing him. But I want to make sure that everyone knows that I’m like the last person in the chain that got this, you know, forward to the community. I’d like to thank Lilia and Greg, for working so much to make this happen. And so, I will also want to share with you the meetup this has been waiting to announce for this community meetup. So, everyone here will be the first to know of this. I’m at meetup right now. Let me go to the meetup page. And let me announce this. And so I’m going to share the link in the chat. Lemme share that with you right now. So right now, this is the first ever announcement of this meetup. It was just pushed out to our community, around 4000 plus members, and later to other communities. And hopefully, everyone here can attend and also share with the communities that you know. Are there any questions or anything I could answer? I again, I really want to thank both Lilia and Greg for making this possible.
Greg Meredith 12:48
Thank you. It’s really our pleasure, by the way it is it’s Lilia. But
Jeff Flowers 12:51
oh, Lilia, I’m so sorry.
Lilia 12:53
It’s okay. No worries. It’s good. Well, thank you so much for putting this together. This is great. Thank you.
Greg Meredith 12:59
Yeah, we’re Really, really looking forward to this? How long is the meetup been running?
Jeff Flowers 13:04
This meetup has been running, it was actually a smart contract meetup. So this was before Ethereum. And so we focused on smart contracts and theoretical fashion and then odious, which was one of the first smart language programming languages. That came out Ripple Labs at the time. So it’s been running for, I want to say seven years.
Greg Meredith 13:26
Wow. So Wow, that’s great. That’s that’s really quite cool. Very good, though. And then the membership is is roughly.
Jeff Flowers 13:38
We have over 4000 presently.
Greg Meredith 13:41
Well, that’s really, really cool. Well, we’ll be sure to mention to your folks since since you say that you started off as a smart contracting meetup. We’ll be sure to mention that we’re having a hackathon in October 10 and 11th. And the primary focus is “on chain governance”. But we’re we’re super happy to look at other problem statements. And and we’re working with a group that has a reach of about 1200 universities in India. So if if your community wants to connect to a larger community, that would be one way to do it.
Jeff Flowers 14:26
This is wonderful. Also, I’ll be honest, most of our founders are not founders, our organizers. We also founded a California nonprofit called the Decentralization Foundation. So if you go to d24n.org, or you could type decentralizationfoundation.org, you can reach us there too. And we’re always looking to promote and advance decentralization technology. So it was really quite heartwarming to hear the previous speaker talking about There’s a need for decentralization and and the XL model. And, you know, these kinds of thoughts are very critical, I think, moving forward in this space.
Greg Meredith 15:11
Absolutely, absolutely. I think you’re, like, if we mentioned a little bit about RChat, you guys might get really, really excited because we’re able to take off the shelf things like zulip live and with with a little bit of work. So zulip is like the open source Slack, right. And with just a little bit of work, we can turn it into a decentralized version of it. With with on chain on chain chat data, yeah, so I’m getting very excited about this. This is really cool.
Jeff Flowers 15:42
I can’t wait – want to thank everyone here, and then I’ll mute myself.
Greg Meredith 15:46
Thank you so much, Jeff. Darryl, are you ready to do the community in review?
Darryl Neudorf 15:51
Sure. Okay. So yeah, Jeff, thanks so much. That was that’s really cool. exciting to hear about this, and I can’t wait to attend on the 28th. Okay, so this is the Week in Review for Thursday the 30th of July to the fifth of August. So last Thursday on the Governance Committee call, the committee provided an update on the newly created strategy improvement working group. The committee discussed the banking industry and the importance of establishing an on an RChain monetary policy. And the committee discussed differences among various forms of cooperatives such as consumer, worker and stakeholder. Also on Thursday was the DAP developer working group where they helped each other with issues making Dappy pages. On Friday, the climate in coordination RCast we discussed a climate lawsuit against the Australian Government, the UN announcing that the climate crisis is a threat to world peace, and Costa Rica’s massive rain forest rehabilitation effort. We also talked about peak oil demand in 2020, leading to the fourth industrial revolution. And the US hearings last week on the anti competitive practices of the Big Four tech monopolies and the increasing need for decentralized solutions. On Monday, the Casper Standup call had some fun talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics in rho-calculus. And you can always check out the CASPER standups by searching “Casper Standup” on YouTube. On Tuesday, the RChain education session – simple rho-lang will get continuations as a second parameter to receive. This will introduce the recursion on the evaluator. We discuss the semantics of the set and how equality can be implemented with ordering of elements. Also yesterday in the communications Working Group call, we discussed the REN multi chain project and how we could potentially get our chain connected up. We also discussed member engagement in voting and how there are open slots for board pieces. And we also talked about the hackathon plans, working with Code Tantra potential for new enthusiasm in charging up our team’s presence in the large pool of developers in India. And Steve Henley proposed an ongoing agenda item to better connect the communications working group with the strategic plan. Also on Tuesday in the DAP developer Working Group call, they reviewed liquid democracy contracts and zulip chat vote bot, they attempted a zulip chat build with meta mask login and realized that they need help configuring the Django meta mask plugin. And then today on the members Hangout, discussion started around the logistics of designing and utilizing a hardware chip for RChain and then moved to a discussion around staking. And that brings us to the present.
Greg Meredith 18:48
Good. Any questions for Darryl? Alright, excellent. So I just want to put put some reminders out there. So while we do have double digits in REV addresses registered and we’ve done, the vast we’ve sent out the vast majority of the incentives on confirm that they are actually at the addresses. We still don’t have all the REV addresses for folks to vote in the AGM in October at the end of October. So please, please, please get your REV addresses out or get your REV addresses to the co op so that you can be part of the voting process for the cooperative in the Annual General Meeting. It’s really, really important. Also, since the annual general meeting is coming up faster than we think if you have any items of business that you would like to submit to the co op now would be the time please please please. If you anything that you’d like to co op to consider as an item of business, it is time to begin submitting those to the cooperative and finally, if you are thinking about running for a board seat, now would be the time to start coordinating that we typically want to organize interviews with potential candidates with the existing board members. So, so if you want to throw your hat in the ring, I strongly encourage it this year, we’ve had a really great board. Very, very active. And I think it would be, you know, it would be a very rewarding experience for anyone who wants to who wants to join the board. So please, please consider that. Any questions about any of those topics?
Darryl Neudorf 20:41
I just like to mention if anyone needs help generating a REV address for voting, you can go to blog,RChain.coop, and there’s a few blog entries there that can help you with that process.
Greg Meredith 20:53
Absolutely. Yep. Um, so as Jeff mentioned, at the end of the month, we’ll be speaking with his meetup. Tomorrow. Mike Stay and Christian Williams and I will be presenting at protocol labs. This was a follow up talk that we got invited to, after Christian gave his talk on the work that we’ve been doing on type systems to MIT. So the MIT category, theory group, invited Christian to give a talk. And as a result of that talk, the folks that protocol labs, saw that and invited us to give a talk at protocol labs. So I’ll be speaking about the role of types in refactoring the internet and Christian will the which will basically set up Christians talk to talk about some of the mathematical details that go into this work. Any questions about that?
21:58
Would this be recorded anywhere?
Greg Meredith 21:59
I’m possibly quite likely Yes. Yes. So there’s an early version of the role of types in refactoring the internet that I gave as Casper stand up. So you can you can look at that. Yeah. The last two Caspar stand ups have been a lot of fun, I heartily recommend those people who are interested in diving a little deeper to go go check those out. I did find a couple of typos in the quantum mechanics thing. I’ll be updating that but by and large, this the math, the math checks out – still there’s a long long way to go. But by and large math checks out so a lot of fun in that regard. Ah, let’s see. Ian, Rao, Darryl, anything I’m missing in terms of material we need to cover in this time. In today’s debrief?
Ian Bloom 23:02
maybe you bring people’s attention to the staking channel on the on the co op Discord.
Greg Meredith 23:09
Yes, that’s right. So it’s it’s, it’s looking like we’ll probably have a new bonding period either Monday or just just after. So by Friday, if you want to stake that’s your deadline so midnight or 11:59 Pacific Daylight Time on Friday is the last we’ll be accepting. staking submissions So please, please get those in. I think it’s the think that email is staking@rchain.coop, if memory serves. So yep, so please if you if you are going if you want to commit to staking now would be the time Let’s see anything else. Any other questions or comments from the community? On today’s call? Going once,
Jeff Flowers 24:11
I have a question that I actually do have REV. I’ve got my REV address. What was that email address for staking again? Never mind. I thought you said.
Greg Meredith 24:26
That’s a great question. I appreciate you bringing folks attention to it again. Okay, going twice. All right. silence is golden. Really appreciate the chance to chat with everyone. And I hope everyone stays safe. There will be some conversations that we’ll be having on the Friday closed door session to update folks on on those matters. So looking forward to seeing some of you then, but otherwise, stay safe. Stay healthy. Talk to you soon.