RChain Update 107: Greg Meredith discusses Casper CBC
Previously on the debrief, Greg Meredith announced the close of a loan on RHaus estimated at roughly one million dollars. The development team commenced work with Whiteblock to deploy RNode on their environment. Kenny Rowe reported the resignation of Kate Gonsalves (CFO) and the establishment of a governance committee to define governance procedures and processes. Emphasis was made on effective communication processes. There was also a conversation about code specification in respect to IOB6.
This week, Greg Meredith offered more brain candy on channel-based security and self-sovereign identity. Ned Robinson fills in for Kelly Foster to give the technical update. The dev team is focused on stability and bug fixing. The hiring of five more developers is underway to help speed up main net delivery. The board submits conflict of interest disclosures. Greg ends the call by elaborating on the Casper consensus protocol in response to Pyrofex’s criticism about its correctness by construction.
Announcements
- The Casper stand-up for Monday hasn’t been posted yet
- Volunteers for the governance committee should indicate their interest in the governance channel on Discord
- Individuals who received payments of any kind from the co-op (specifically Americans) must fill in their 1099 form for tax preparations
- Q4 financial report due January 2019
- Check out RNode v 0.8.1 release features
- Weekly operations progress report
- The co-op will be hiring five developers to help accelerate the speed of Mercury delivery
- Visit our dev website for development tools
- Try our Rholang tutorial
Timeline
Greg Meredith’s brain candy: channel based security and self-sovereign identity
Technical update: RNode v0.8.1 released, with stability work and bug fixes
Kenny Rowe’s progress report: Conflict of interest disclosure submitted
Greg Meredith speaks on Casper CBC: A response to Pyrofex’s tweet
Content in Brief
Greg Meredith’s brain candy: channel-based security and self-sovereign identity
- Greg Meredith gives a presentation on the notions of identity in which he addresses:
- Communication acts across a range of channels
- Channels can be things like phone numbers, email addresses, blockchain addresses
- Expectations about those communication acts
- Claims as communications made about basic observations including communications about communication acts and claims about claims
- He also showed how these communication acts can be expressed in Rholang
Technical update:RNode v0.8.1 released, stability work and bug fixes
General
RNode v0.8.1 released
- See node-0.8 release plan for information about this release and links to artifacts and a docker image. We will update the website as soon as web development support is available to assist
Test net status
- A public test net is not yet available. We do have a development test net running to support debugging work
- New debugging tool created this week to help visualize the blockchain. This tool produces a text file that can be pasted into Graphviz to create an image like the one shown below. Planned additions include information in the blocks for the name of the validator
- Platform stability is priority #1Mercury requirements and acceptance criteria
- The work continues to collect and define user stories defining the requirements for Mercury
- The development team has worked this sprint to support the creation of test cases and acceptance criteria for stories that are ready
- User story requirements, testing scenarios, and status will be reported in features.md. This is a work in progress. When complete, stakeholders will have a web-based dashboard showing the requirements and the status of the acceptance criteria
Work with Whiteblock
- In progress. Waiting for handoff from Whiteblock to the development team so they can begin using this testing resource.
Rholang team
- In addition to supporting stability work, working on other bugs and continuing work on the block store
Casper team
- Fully focused on stability work
- Working to build in-depth Casper knowledge on the team. Kent led a learning session with members of the team late last week. This increased the ability of others on the team to support Casper-related work
Node team
- Priority is work related to platform stability. This includes work with the SRE team to improve metrics and monitoring to assist with platform debugging
- Bug found in Kademlia (CORE-1546). Introduced by a change a few weeks ago that did not create failures in CI. Work in progress to both resolve the bug and expand the test coverage for Kademlia and the P2P protocols
Storage team
- Priority is stability work
- Review of the peek prototype is in progress
SRE team
- Made significant improvements to the CI process last week by implementing Bors support for the timing of CI relative to the opening, review, approval, and request to merge PRs. This already reduced testing time, caught some issues early, and better assures PRs don’t break dev
- Support work for the release of RNode v0.8.1 this week
- Other work supports the stability effort
- Awaiting web development support to make updates related to the release of RNode v0.8.1 and to the REV issuance page, which no longer reflects the current timeline for the Mercury release
- Derek, Ian, and Kayvan have been working on updating the web property. Derek hopes to get full access to the website within a few days
Kenny Rowe’s progress report: Conflict of interest disclosures submitted
- Individuals who received payment from the co-op (specifically for Americans) should fill out their 1099 form for tax preparations
- The board has submitted its conflict of interest disclosures
- Draft for membership governance participation waiting for a review from the governance committee to make progress with it
- Volunteers interested to be enlisted in the governance committee should indicate their interest in the governance channel on Discord
- Unofficial board minutes have been published on GitHub
Greg Meredith speaks on Casper CBC: A response to Pyrofex’s tweet
Q: Will the implementation of the constraints for synchronizing be available when main net launches?
A: Yes
Comment: Double spending and liveness on Casper
Originally published at blog.rchain.coop on December 14, 2018.
