Status as of Monday, October 6

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Mon Oct 06, 2014 9:20 am

There is nothing more frustrating than 10:00 on Sunday night arriving, and I can't wait until Saturday to get here so I can get this done. Here's the status after the weekend:

This weekend was all about merge mining. I've completed all of the infrastructure changes necessary to track and pay people for merge mining profits. I updated the profitability calculations, and completely reworked the share details page to display the more complicated case of having multiple "mined coins" and multiple "payout coins."
The only issue remaining is submitting blocks to the auxiliary networks; in particular, there is a "Aux pow merkle root incorrect" error. I spent six hours yesterday trying to fix the issue and discovered many cases where the blocks I was creating were not exactly the same template as the network expected, but none of the changes so far has fixed this problem. Of greatest concern is that I have been unable to locate any documentation across the entire Internet as to what the "merkle branch" should be if the block has only the coinbase transaction. My assumption is that its length is zero and the branch is a null string, because there aren't any other transactions to create a tree with.
If this issue can't be resolved easily, then I will add debug code to the dogecoin daemon and recompile it to get a better error message.
Once the blocks can be submitted to the auxiliary networks, then there will be a feature freeze and all of this stuff will be tested and released, including the features that were completed last month.
The release is so massive that it is likely to take the entire site down for 6 hours while the database is changed and reindexed, and we validate that all changes were made successfully. At this point, my guess would be a release on October 18, but that's only a guess.
After the release, aggressive marketing will follow. The money runs out in 2.5 months, so we will have about 7 weeks to determine if the project should continue or be scrapped. Since no real marketing has occurred yet, we have no idea which one will be true.
Chris is trying to contact Cryptsy to obtain access to some of their wallet data so that we can determine when their wallets are in "maintenance mode" and add errors for those coins.