Gridcoin Mandatory v3.6.0.2 - V8 Staking Time Estimate Update

To recap, the V8 stake engine is set to come live in just over 2000 blocks, and will remove mag based stake weight, thus preventing researchers from securing the network. This job will now be solely on the shoulders of investors in a classic POS system. Such a change was required to patch several security vulnerabilities uncovered by the dev team. An unfortunate side effect is that it will now be much harder for miners to get paid for their research by staking a block if they are 'mining' solo (instead of in a pool). The question over the last few weeks has been how much harder.

So, How Much Harder is 'Harder'?

In the last article I used the network stake weight to estimate how often anyone will stake a block on the Gridcoin blockchain, based on their balance. When comparing the numbers with @denravonska's (Ravon's) empirical data, we found a significant gap between the two predictions. Ravon contacted the Blackcoin dev team asking about the network weight, as Gridcoin is based on the Blackcoin architecture, who replied with:

There is no way to observe directly how many coins are staking. The network weight is just an estimator for the unobservable total staking funds. It is calculated from the difficulty. The network weight you see in the GUI is a function of a running average of the difficulty.

What this means is that the number that we have been assuming to be the total number of coins staking, is in fact not that at all. The number of coins staking will be lower. The implications are twofold:

• We have been vastly overestimating how much of the total GRC in existence is actually staking and securing the network.
• My estimates provided were overestimates of the time/balance required to stake. We have no way of knowing by how much.

That being said, the upper bound figures provided still hold true. If we assume all coins are actively staking (390 million GRC), then the required balances to stake at frequency X is:

• 432,000 GRC (USD$17280 of GRC) to stake daily
• 63,000 GRC (USD$2520 of GRC) to stake weekly
• 15,000 GRC (USD$600 of GRC) to stake monthly
• 2400 GRC (USD$96 of GRC) to stake every 6 months

The fact that we have been overestimating the number of coins staking is another good reason to only allow investors to earn interest when their wallets are online. Interest is paid in return for securing the network, and clearly most investors are not securing the network - instead only popping online for a few blocks every blue moon to collect their owed GRC. The side effect of this is that such a change will bring the reality of staking times far closer to the above estimate.

Some Final Notes Before V8

• Make sure that you upgrade your client to the latest version, which is currently v3.6.0.2. If you do not, you will end up on the abandoned fork of the Gridcoin blockchain when it reaches block 1010001.
• V8 will drop your stake rate if you are primarily a miner. If you are not staking often enough for your liking, I recommend joining a pool. There is currently only one pool, which charges zero fees aside from a withdrawal fee.
• While I am critical of the changes affecting miners in V8, I want to reiterate that the change as a whole is good and necessary for the Gridcoin network. There are already ideas being fielded to benefit the miners, such as integrating research payment into superblocks.

Remember that this is the environment all successful crypto investors passed through. If you get in early on a coin, you deal with hiccups such as this, and if you get lucky it pays off. For all intents and purposes, it is still very early days for Gridcoin. Lets see where this journey takes us, and I'm looking forward to the many more valuable contributions we make to science.

Full article here.

Exchanges Halt Transactions for GRC

Mandatory Releases

As many of you that run Gridcoin wallets have noticed, or hopefully will see now, there was a mandatory update rolled out on the 22nd of August. Since then there has been another Mandatory Update Released. We are now at the latest mandatory release of 3.6.0.2.
You can find a Release note and the source code on the Gridcoin GitHub Repository.

Exchanges halting during this process

An update for exchanges requires at least two weeks’ notice. On August 21st, the day before the new Mandatory was released, all exchanges and services were notified of this. During the process of updating the wallets and rolling out the new mandatory version, most exchanges have halted their wallets.
We’ve had confirmations of the following exchanges or services:

• Cointopay
• C-CEX
• Coinpayments
• Cryptogames
• OpenLedger
• HolyTransactions

Notified exchanges or services without confirmation responses

• Bittrex
• Poloniex
• Coinomi
• Eobot

Block 1010001 – On 1st of September

At block 1010001 the Gridcoin wallets will require the latest mandatory version. On this date, all exchanges and services can guarantee that there is no old client on the network and start their transaction wallets once again.
If the production of blocks continues at the current rate of 900 blocks per day, we can expect this to occur on 1st of September around 2-4 PM UTC.

Full article here

New Release version 3.6.0.1 Gridcoin Research Wallet Mandatory

New Release version 3.6.0.1 Gridcoin Research Wallet Mandatory

Keep in mind:  

• before you upgrade, make a !backup

For Windows users specifically:                      

• the new Windows installer 3.6.0.1 is soon downloadable from here,
• or you can update from within your Windows client

All other users (Linux, Mac, ...):

• can find the source code here, OR: 
• upgrade from their used location (e.g. package managers, once the  responsible person for those package managers made the new version  available)

Changes in this version are (more detailed here, changelog, commit and forum):

added:

• V8 stake engine: set to start producing V8 blocks at block 1010000. This fixes several security issues, see wiki for details.
• Blocks can now carry identification from the "org" argument/configuration option
• Add "reorganize" RPC command

changed:

• Improved security on NeuralNet votes, #496
• Berkeley DB V6+ compatibility, #451
• Improved poll loading speeds, #497
• Versions now contain the git hash, #500
• Improved RPC help. It now supports "execute help" and "list help", #512
• Voting is now integrated in wallet as a tab and cleaned up, #416
• Improve low-peer mining ability on testnet
• Improve poll error message when low on funds, #415
• Code cleanup

Removed

• Remove RPC commands:  
  • DAO, #486
  • volatilecode, testnet0917, testboinckey, chainrsa, testcpidv2, testcpid, windows error report disabling, list betatest, fDebug4/fDebug5 flags

Fixed

• Fixed security issue where superblocks could be injected, #526
• Fix poll sorting bug, #512

Please tell us when you experience problems!

• e.g. in our bugtracker (forum, reddit, IRC, slack, telegram (can be accessed via IRC also), twitter, ...)

Gridcoin US site update

Gridcoin US

New Gridcoin Intro

GRCStarter Proposal

GRCStarter@Home Proposal

 

This proposal describes a project called GRCStarter@home. GRCStarter's operation is similar to that of WCG -- it is a single project that works on many projects. The difference between GRCStarter and WCG is in their priorities and how they distribute magnitude to their crunchers.

Full Proposal here. 

 

Gridcoin Research v3.5.9.9 / MSI=43.3 - Leisure Wallet Upgrade

 

https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@peppernrino/gridcoin-research-v3-5-9-9-msi-43-3-leisure-wallet-upgrade

Twitch Event

ZenMercenary - Friday at 6pm Central time

Twitch Event  (Click to go to Twitch or copy link)

EVENT: "Drinkin' Whiskey and Building ThreadRipper"

What I'm Doing: Upgrading my 1800x BOINC rig to ThreadRipper 1950x.
Specs of new build: TR 1950X, AORUS Gaming 7 Motherboard, 32GB RAM, Three GEFORCE GTX 1080 GPUs, Corsair H115i AIO Cooler.

Who am I?: Nobody, honestly. I'm just a guy willing to share his ThreadRipper build live on Twitch. I am not an expert, so don't expect this build to be greatly methodical or to feel like a YouTube review video. I'm gonna drink some whiskey, build this computer, and have a good time chatting with whoever wants to watch
.
Other Details: I'll be streaming 1080p @ 60FPS, there will be lots of lighting so you will be able to see everything in the case in great detail. I've got a Blue Yeti microphone so audio should be good as well. If the build goes smoothly, I'd be happy to stick around and run some benchmarks. If you can't make it, I believe Twitch saves the streams so you'll be able to tune in another time.

rain large GRC amount when Gridcoin stakes its 1-million-block