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Hello all!
We had yet another small bump in the price of MintCoin this week, going from 10 satoshi to 12 satoshi. Sadly this did not help us answer the most popular question on the MintCoin Telegram group, which is of course: "when moon?"
Development was slow again this week, but not stopped. Lets look at what happened....
Enlil was able to put together a working Windows build. It is not pretty, as it is cross-compiled and only builds on older versions of Ubuntu, but it does seem to work. It is now available on:
https://snapshot.mintcoin.zone
It should work on any version of Windows that Microsoft supports.
This is exciting because having a Windows build is of course essential for any release. While no self-respecting hacker would ever be caught dead with a Windows system, it turns out that many non-hackers find Windows somehow. Even otherwise enlightened MintCoin users find themselves on Windows systems. 😉
By looking through various pieces of GitHub archaeology the needed components for getting an ARM build fell into place, and we now have a working MintCoin wallet on ARM!
https://github.com/shane-kerr/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet/tree/arm-build
This is very cool news because it leaves the possibility of setting up a Raspberry Pi or some other low-powered, silent system that is always on and not only holds your MintCoin but also handles minting new ones for you.
Since a Raspberry Pi 3 with a micro SD card and power supply will probably run €45 or so, this is a pretty significant investment just for MintCoin... on the other hand, if you ask around you will probably find a lot of your more geeky friends have a Raspberry Pi or two lying in a drawer somewhere. Note that other single-board-computer (SBC) running on ARM processors are available and some are even cheaper. See what you can come up with!
Note that currently only the daemon version has been tested, but there should be no reason that we cannot get the GUI version working soon.
We'll let this build run for a few days on a Raspberry Pi 3 and if it seems stable then it will get merged into the main development branch, and a binary for downloads will be published for testing.
You may recall from the development update two weeks ago, 2018-02-09, that we had a fix for a performance bug in the wallet.
It turns out that this fix actually broke the wallet when attempting to synchronize from the first block on the blockchain. I had never run it in this mode, but during the ARM testing this problem was revealed. A simple fix was put in place, so we have working code again, but this underscores the issues with lack of tests that we have right now.
There are a few more important things to add than tests in the code now, but it will probably be top priority after our next release.
Our intrepid Minty All Day closed a few of the issues on the main MintCoin GitHub repository that had been sitting around idle for a while.
On the unofficial side, there is now a slew of issues that have been categorized:
https://github.com/shane-kerr/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet/issues
These are now tagged so you can easily see which are bugs, which are suggestions, and so on. A ton of these are labeled "help wanted", which means that if you or anyone you know is able to help it would be much appreciated. A couple are even labeled "good first issue", as they do not require much deep knowledge of the code base and anyone who can code in C++ should be able to jump right in.
We have started to collect a lot of fixes and improvements to MintCoin, and each of these is nicely stored on a separate branch. However, it has started to become a lot of branches, so I have pulled these together into a single place:
https://github.com/shane-kerr/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet
Building from here will always result in what I think is the best version of MintCoin possible at any given time.
Also, the README.md that you see in MintCoin's GitHub page is crusty
and old. An updated version has been authored, which is also used on
the combined repository. It also includes some revised links as well
as an updated mini-FAQ. (I may have to add "when moon?", and maybe
"when will MintCoin be on more exchanges?!?!", but I think it is okay
for now.)
As has become custom in these updates, here is a look at our current goals.
The main focus now is getting a new version of the wallet that we can publish which contains updated builds and all of the fixes that we can. In order for that to happen, we need:
Things that would be nice:
Things that should be done someday:
As always, if you would like to help, please either contact us or just fork the code on GitHub and start hacking.
Until next update, remember: if it ain't Mint, it ain't much.
Your Minty Pal, Shane Kerr
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.