Edition .01| April 2018
Welcome to the 1st Edition of The Chronicles. The Chronicles will serve as the platform for the team to summarize Qbic achievements and to provide updates on on-going and future project developments. For those riding this rollercoaster alongside us, thank you for your company… It’s been an exciting ride so far!
…speaking of excitement… we’re only a couple months in and already on Qbic 2.0! But, how did we get here and what’s next? What about ______?… Well, keep reading. We’ll cover a variety of topics including the Qbic rebrand journey + Bounty Campaign, the Qnode Guide + FAQ, and finally, Business Strategist, Michael Rossi, will share his progress report and a few thoughts on project developments.
Qbic (re)brand!
“On the 25th of February 2018, control of Qbic was transitioned to a management team with retail banking technology experience, to oversee a project re-structure, including the creation of a whitepaper, a new and updated roadmap, and an extensive re-branding exercise, including the website and all other communication channels.” — Michael Rossi
… and like that, Qbic 2.0 was born!
As a team, “we look forward to the challenge of raising the profile and value of this project in a sustainable way and will continue to cultivate a positive and helpful community.” — M.R.
…If you haven’t already, swing by and Meet the Team!
Qbic 2.0 Tagline Bounty
In the spirit of cultivating a positive community vibe, the team thought it would be fun to recruit and incentivize the community to create the Qbic 2.0 tagline…
…Behold the Qbic 2.0 Tagline Bounty:
With over 100 participants submitting tagline ideas, it was difficult to narrow it down to only one winner… so we didn’t… Instead, the team narrowed it down to 3 finalists, and with the help of the voters (you), we crowned Mohammed Taufeeq (@tanveerkn) as the champion! Congrats, Mohammed!… And THANK YOU to all who read the WP, submitted ideas, retweeted, and/or voted; we had a blast and hope you did too.
Fitting right? We thought so too…
Stay tuned for more Qbic bounties. And, as usual, if you have any ideas, (bounty or otherwise) visit our Discord #community-suggestions channel and/or email them to drew@qbic.io.
Qnode Guide(s) 2.0
Another priority for the team was to update the Qnode Guide to include recent developments and how-to’s. Shout out to JoeyD (@joeydiblasi) for putting in the hours on this document… he really loves you and wants you to succeed. :)
Reminder: the Qnode Guide 2.0 is a work in progress and will be updated periodically.
Wait… there’s more! Crypt0.Zone (@Crypt0Zone) also hooked us up with a “Setting up a Qbic Qnode for noobs” guide. Pictures are worth a thousand words, right? Thanks, guys. You rock!
Community #FAQ
Discord, Telegram, BitcoinTalk, and Twitter… these are the channels where you can find us (we’re committing to be more active on Reddit, Facebook, and Slack soon too). If you’ve stopped by, you’ve noticed that our community is growing and an increasing amount of Q&A is taking place.. which is a great thing!
Most recent FAQ’s:
•Connections / No Block Source Available
A growing number of questions in recent weeks have been related to the above-mentioned issue(s). Whether you’re a new member of the community or downloading a new Qbic wallet, chances are you’ve run into a problem with the wallet not connecting to the network upon startup. This is a know issue and the solution is to simply add connections via the debug log and/or qbic.conf. Check out the FAQ for details.
•Watchdog_Expired → New Start Required → Repeat → WTF!
…This has been the dog of them all (get it? dog? never mind…). 1001q+ purchased on exchange, sent to wallet, a brand new Qnode setup… boom! Wait… Watchdog Expired!?!? So you ask the community “what to do?” and everyone says “don’t worry, Watchdog will fix itself…” Ok, but the next time you look at your node, expecting “Pre Enabled or Enabled,” instead, it says, “New Start Required.” Ok, let’s try it again… “Start Alias” from local wallet… nope, back to “New Start Required!” WTF!!
The bad news; the problem is complex and could be the result of a variety of issues: VPS reboot, 0 connections, block count at 0 (or stuck, at 52655 maybe?), bad “update script” installation, just to name a few…. The good news; we’ve updated the FAQ with troubleshooting solutions to help you get your node back up and running ASAP.
Here’s the thing; we do our best to be online to help everyone in real-time and 1:1, but, when we can’t be online, and you have a questions, we know how frustrating it can be to have to wait for an answer and/or scour through the channels, one by one… So, in the name of efficiency, we’ve done the work for you and compiled your most common questions into the Qbic FAQ.
Reminder: Qbic FAQ is also pinned in our Discord #faq channel.
A progress report and more… by Michael Rossi
Since the management team took over at the end of February we’ve made great strides to improve key areas of the project. Blockchain projects aren’t conventional in their nature and it’s been a steep learning curve, but we’ve adapted well. We’ve also grown the core team to include an illustrator, two full stack developers, and several group moderators. There have been challenges but these have made us stronger and more resolute in our objectives, and we’re looking forward to the challenges of the coming months.
• Difficulty Retargeting
Mining is an essential service for coins using the proof of work consensus mechanism. Most of the community will know this but it’s important to understand the motivations of miners. For more prominent coins, miners may have an interest in mining and holding, especially when some future projections for those coins are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. These coins have an army of miners competing for whatever rewards they can get and the sheer number of these miners ensures the combined hashing power remains high, too high for anyone to command a monopoly or to manipulate. However, for the lesser known coins, the motivation is geared toward instant profitability. High mining rewards and the availability of cheap hashing power only serves to create opportunities for profit seeking miners, and without the security of an army of miners and their high hashing power, the other coins have to make do with the profiteers. This creates a unique problem, with low hashing power comes a low block difficulty and the opportunity for someone to rent a large amount of hashing power to claim as many block rewards as possible before the difficulty is inevitably raised. Rather than continue to mine after the difficulty is raised, these miners move to the next opportunity leaving the block difficulty high and not enough hashing power to find the next block in 2 minutes or even 20 minutes.
Whilst we can’t engineer an army of miners to average out the hashing power, we can engineer a better difficulty retargeting algorithm. It’s taken a bit of time and we’ve been testing a solution. We’re nearly there.
• Proof of Stake
Whilst we see the benefits of proof of stake, it is quite an undertaking moving from POW to POS, especially having spent a couple of weeks developing a new retargeting algorithm. Therefore, the immediate consensus mechanism for Qbic will be POW and we may look to POS in the future.
• Exchanges
More exchanges are likely not helpful for a coin with low volume as this probably dilutes volume rather than increase it. I’m a big believer that if you have a good project, and you’re listed on just one reputable exchange, people will come to you. There are scenarios where adding exchanges might be helpful but those particular exchanges have the luxury of picking and choosing more established coins. This leaves us with our existing exchanges and I’d sooner delist from a couple of them and channel all volume through one or two, than continue to rely on the less reputable of our current stable. This brings me to coinexchange.io, voted for by investors as the next exchange listing, and as such has made its way into the Qbic 2.0 roadmap. An approach was made to coinexchange.io by the Russian partners and terms were discussed. So far an agreement has not been reached but our priorities must be stability over more listings.
That’s it for this edition of The Chronicle, folks… thanks for reading and thank you for the opportunity to continue to build this project and grow the community. Until next time, stay tuned to our channels… we may or may not have some mobile wallets updates coming soon! ;)
Peace, love, and prosperity
Dr.eW
