Meros Update #23

Meros Cryptocurrency
Nov 2 · 2 min read

Welcome to Meros’s Update #23, covering 9/26/19 to 10/30/19! In our last update, we informed our readers that we would no longer have updates on a fixed time schedule due to difficulty maintaining it. This update was written, despite containing less news than usual, in order to still provide updates frequently. In it, we cover the progress on removing the Consensus DAG and the reasons why progress has been slower than usual.

We’ve successfully upgraded the Blockchain to not reference the Consensus DAG! Again, this enables adding subnet voting in the future, massively speeding up the protocol. In the old system, every Merit Holder had their votes indexed from 0 to n. Blocks contained a list of Merit Holders and their latest n. Now, Blocks list Transactions by their hashes, along with the Merit Holders who verified them.

This has the unfortunate side effect of making Blocks quite large. To solve this, we’ve improved our Blocks by adding Pinsketch-based sketches. Pinsketch is a set reconciliation algorithm based on BCH codes. By combining two sketches of distinct elements, the elements which are only present in one sketch can be retrieved as long as they’re within a certain tolerance. This enables not only agreeing on the Block’s contents, but also discovering missing elements. Sketches are much more compact, as a sketch with a tolerance of 20% is around ~1.5% the size of the hashes/verifiers.

We’ve also made several other improvements to the Blockchain. We’ve implemented pool resistant mining, and upgraded Merit Holders to use nicknames. Nicknames are two-byte IDs, assigned incrementally to every new Merit Holder, used to save space by taking the place of the 48-byte key.

Our last notable progress update is how we’ve thoroughly cleaned and improved the Networking stack. With the new protocol requiring a vastly different, and improved, syncing mechanism, we took the opportunity to clean our syncing code. From there, we kept cleaning and simplifying, turning our worst part of the code base into one of our best.

As for the reason why there’s been less progress for this time period, it’s because I, Luke Parker, have been taking contract jobs to stay afloat. To be clear, despite needing to work on these other projects, I have still tried to spend at least half of my time on Meros.

Meros did not, and will never. have an ICO. Meros did not, and will never have, a token before mainnet. I’ve always considered both damaging to cryptocurrencies, putting profit over technology. That said, we also don’t have institutional funding, putting all of Meros’s developers without funds until Meros launches. This is why I’ve been taking contracts.

That concludes our updates for these weeks. It’s been slow progress on a major change for the better, which I’ll be very excited to finish. As we have said every time, we’re excited for Meros’s future, and we’ll make sure to update you with our progress.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade