Weekly Burst Report #26

The Weekly Burst Report is a report published every Sunday meant to centralize and outline the important Burst information of the week.

Development

Core development statistics since last week:
— Files modified: 59
— New insertions (+): 1,145
— New deletions (-): 9,181
Total since the release of 1.3.6cg: 217,102 insertions (+), 321,661 deletions (-).

• Concerning the BRS 2.0.0 core version:
• Development continues unhindered and the release date finally seems close. “The PoCC has set March 15th as a viable and realistic release date for BRS 2.0.0. However, should some unforeseen complications arise, quality goes over release dates”, states PoC Consortium developer rico666. Brabantian — another core developer — explained that the delay is mainly caused by a “serious scope change”. He explains: “lots of new ideas came up on how we could further improve the wallet from a technical perspective, and that’s what we’re doing right now.” Meanwhile, there is ongoing daily development and technical quality improvements.
• As of now there is 20% of the code being automatically unit tested and integration tested. Brabantian further explained: “My projection is that number will heavily increase when moving toward BRS 2.2.0 because there will be a heavier focus on making the integration testing easier.”
• More generally, if you are interested I suggest you to read the last few weekly reports to get a wide overview of the changes that will be introduced by 2.0.0. The fundamental thing to know is that not a single line of code is left untouched — this is going to be the greatest code revamp in Burst’s history.
• The PoC Consortium released the source code of its “all-new, fabulous, hyper-efficient, scalable and robust” pool software. It is now available for any pool-operator who does support The Burst Dymaxion. A great news, as it should help enhance the scalability and reliability of the network as a whole.
• In addition to that, a new feature is included: Dynamic payouts. Miners can now send messages to the pool account to change their payment thresholds/intervals (daily, weekly, monthly or at any chosen amount). Have a look at the pool documentation here for a more thorough explanation.
• The interview of Herscht and bold, the two PoC Consortium developers in charge of the pool software will be published this week on The Burstcoinist.
• cg_obup, the Optimized Burst Unix Plotter has been updated. New features and usability improvements are included and it now offers MacOS compatibility. Download it on GitHub.
• If you don’t understand what PoC2 is exactly, or why we need it, this new “PoC2 explained” article is just for you. It explains the flaw of the current PoC consensus protocol and the implementation process of PoC2. The next step towards the new Burst!

Websites

• Burst is now listed on a new exchange: Indacoin, where it can be bought directly with Visa or MasterCard (EUR, USD and RUB pairings). Indacoin seems to be unavailable for US residents. The full list of Burst exchanges can always be found here.
• The PoC Consortium’s Burst explorer now has a functional API.
• You may know Reddit user BurstJack already — he has been working on Burst smart contracts for months. Here, he proposes to build a listing platform similar to the stateofthedapps.com website. Feel free to participate on the thread and to help him make this a reality.

Other

• The PoC Consortium issued an official statement regarding hard forks on the Burst subreddit. The developers thank the Burst community for its support (we recently reached 85% of 1.3.6cg nodes) and will therefore proceed as planned in the Burst Dymaxion white paper. However, some misconceptions had to be cleared:
• “There is no new chain. There is just a modified continuation of the old, the one and only, chain. […] All Burst accounts and their balances, all assets, all smart contracts as well as all other types of transactions remain untouched by the hard fork. The blockchain is immutable. Should the hard fork cause any discrepancies there — and we have ZERO evidence this could even happen — it would be considered a bug that had to be fixed and it would be fixed.”
• Beware of the FUD, and always do your own research: one individual is trying to lure miners to his own pool by falsely claiming that PoCC pools are stealing burstcoins from their subscribers. The claims were quickly debunked by community members, as you can see thanks to the pinned comment in this thread.
• Scammers have been impersonating some team members in private Telegram & Discord messages lately. Please be very wary while dealing with anybody — double-check that you are speaking with the right person before clicking any links. Also, we would NEVER send you a PM asking you to send us money.

Conclusion

Looking back only six months ago, we had inferior and incomplete infrastructure, unstable and barely scalable softwares, a broken community and almost no hope for the future of Burst. What a long way we have come! Burst is so unrecognizable it almost seems like it was relaunched around September 2017. All the efforts are paying off and I strongly believe we are on the right track for 2018.

Thank you and see you next week,

Tom Créance (@Gadrah)

If I forgot something in that report, let me know and I will make sure to mention it next week.

Originally published at The Burstcoinist — Your #1 News Resource about Burst!.