This development dispatch covers work completed since the Decred v1.0.1 release on April 29th, 2017. Since then, developers have merged over 150 pull requests into 8 repositories.
Here are direct links to the Paymetheus (Windows) GUI wallet installers:
Decrediton (OSX, Linux) GUI wallet installers:
dcrinstall cross-platform text-based CLI installers:
All the various binaries except for dcrinstall:
NOTE: All Windows binaries only support Windows 7 and newer.
This patch release primarily focused on UI/UX changes to the Paymetheus and Decrediton GUIs with improvements in ticket purchasing, address generation and rescanning, and passphrase management. In the backend, dcrwallet received a number of database enhancements and performance boosts as well better error handling. Progress was also made in dcrd with better block and error handling. For those interested in the technical details of all changes that occurred in the codebase, please consult the release notes.
The following changes may be of interest to users and are of note:
Paymetheus
- It is no longer possible to set a public passphrase when creating a wallet, and if a public passphrase was set on an existing wallet, users are given the opportunity to remove the passphrase. This change was made because the public passphrase was not effective and became a nuisance to many users.
- The Purchase Tickets view is now simply called Tickets and has been slightly modified to provide a better user experience. The split transaction fee setting has been removed from this view and labels on some of the other settings have been modified to make the options more understandable.
- There is now a button in the Tickets view to create ticket revocations. If a stakepool fails to vote or the vote is not included in a block by miners, and the pool also does not issue a revocation transaction, users can create the revocations themselves directly from the GUI.
- When importing scripts, it is now possible to start a rescan for all additional relevant transactions involving the script. This means that stakepool users restoring from seed will no longer need to drop down to the command-line tooling to fix their wallets.
- With the recent increase in Decred’s value, default transaction fees have been dropped from 0.01 DCR/kB to 0.001.
Decrediton
- It is now possible to import scripts into a Decrediton wallet. This will help users who are restoring from seed or transitioning from another wallet and also use a stakepool see their balance properly.
- The ability to issue ticket revocations has been added to the ticket page for cases where a stakepool does not vote or the vote is not included in a block.
- Log files can now be viewed using the system file browser from a menu item to help users debug or see issues.
- The private passphrase on a wallet may now be changed from within Decrediton.
- The rescan and address discovery features have been improved to speed up import and startup and prevent possible balance confusion.
Special Event
This release also coincided with the first ever Decred Ask Me Anything (AMA) event on Reddit. If you missed the AMA, you are welcome to enjoy the archived thread of the DCR team and community with special guest and lead developer @davecgh on the Decred subreddit. Thank you to @Noah, pvtwarren, and @Tivra for helping put it together!
Public Keys
The file cmd/dcrinstall/pubkey.go contains the decred public key which is used to check the signed manifest in the release. You can compare the contents of this file to what you get from a keyserver to confirm that dcrinstaller is using the proper key.
Contributors
As always, thank you to the great contributors who made this release possible: Arriu, @ay-p, @chappjc, @dhill, @jcv, @jolan, @jrick, and @peterzen.
Originally published at forum.decred.org on June 9, 2017.
