Day 1: Tari testnet + dev updates

Thank you for being a part of the Tari community

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to play with the Tari testnet, run a node, download the Aurora wallet, find bugs, and provide feedback. The outpouring of positive feedback from the community has been truly incredible. The only way that Tari will be successful is if there is a strong community that finds it useful.

An ethos that is emerging from the Tari community is continuous improvement. Developers in the Tari community are working to improve the protocol and related applications continually. A number of the reported issues have fixes in the works, and there is progress towards meaningful improvements.

Development updates

New Tari base node binaries released

New Tari base node binaries are now available. The new binaries update wallets to monitor transaction recipients for liveness and resend Txs automatically. This update should fix an issue with transactions being stuck in pending when recipient wallets are not online at the time the Tx is sent. Additionally, a new binary was released for Windows that fixes a bug that prevented Windows nodes from communicating with other non-Windows nodes.

Download the latest binaries here.

Emoji IDs

The Emoji ID concept has been generally well-received by the community. One challenge that has emerged is that copy & pasting Emoji IDs can be inconsistent. It appears some apps convert emojis into images, therefore, breaking Emoji ID sharing. Also, some emojis are not supported on older Android devices. Developers in the Tari community are looking into ways to make Emoji ID sharing more robust. In the meantime, sharing QR codes is a reliable means of sharing your testnet Tari address.

Synchronization Issues

Blocks are not being broadcast around the network fast enough to prevent a large number of orphans. The leading cause for this appears to be due to connections between nodes and wallets being dropped for no apparent reason, making the network far more partitioned and fractured than it should be. Developers are working towards solving this issue.

The same issue is resulting in countersigned transactions not reaching their destinations, resulting in “Stuck in pending” transactions — particularly between wallets.

Mempool issues

Bugs have been reported in the mempool code that’s resulting in it handing invalid blocks to miners. Fixes will hopefully become available soon.

Reported general wallet issues:

• Wallet balance is being displayed incorrectly in some cases.
• Battery consumption is high on Android.
• Stuck and pending transactions (See above).
• No way to cancel transactions in Aurora

Do you know of an issue that isn’t on this list? Please share it on Telegram, or shake your phone with the app open to send a bug report, or email bug_reports@tari.com

Documentation

There are lots of tickets regarding installation issues. Tari contributors are tackling this on a few fronts:

• making the installation process more seamless to begin with
• Updating README’s and docs to cover the most common installation problems
• releasing a how-to video for installing a node

If you’ve figured out an installation gotcha, or had someone from the community help you out, please document your findings in a pull request.

Release schedule

The Tari community has reached consensus around a plan to release new binaries for Tari base node on Tari.com, and a new version of Aurora on the iOS and Play stores. The current idea is to tag a release on Wednesdays for release the following Monday. This will allow those who wish to run bleeding edge versions to test the new release for issues for a few days (by compiling from source) ahead of the weekly release.

Help us build, grow, and learn

Hopefully, Tari will become a project that many find useful and enjoyable to use. Every voice is important and all feedback & contributions are encouraged.

Here are some ways to join the growing Tari community:

• Join us on Telegram
• IRC (#Tari-dev on Freenode)
• Discuss with us on Reddit
• Follow us on Twitter
• Download the Aurora wallet
• Run a node
• If you find bugs, report them on Github