15 April 2019 – 15 May 2019
Preamble
Over the past month, the Bismuth Foundation has been engaged in the planning, development, and release of numerous improvements and updates. Although the vast majority of activity goes under the radar, it all builds up to something that will be felt by every user of the Bismuth platform. This month has seen numerous updates to the core code, a milestone in marketing planning, as well as an introduction to Bismuth’s first use-case: the protection of intellectual property, secured directly on the Bismuth blockchain. Although more information on this will be announced very soon, let us delve into the rest of this month’s progress report.
Core development
This month has seen a change in the official Github repository for the Bismuth node client. The previous repository was under the founder Jan Kucera, and has now been shifted over to the official Bismuth Foundation repository. This permits a far more streamlined and fluid collaboration between members of the growing core development team. In addition, the age of the previous repository and its length of historical files bottlenecked the git clone process for new installs. The new repository will allow for a fresh start on collaborative development for the Bismuth project- linked here. Below are the more technical core development updates that occured within the past month.
- Bismuth node version 4.2.9.3 underwent extensive testing and entered a stable state earlier this month. It was released last week, available here.
- Implemented bootstrap checks.
- Implemented regtest mode troubleshooting.
- Implemented a new analysis tool that mirrors block analysis, and rebuilds in order to strengthen the bootstrap archive verification.
- Implemented improvements for logging.
Marketing
The Bismuth Foundation has undergone rigorous planning for marketing over the next weeks to months- which is a milestone considering that over the past two years, very minimal effort was put into this area. Although most of the marketing strategizing occurs internally to prevent jeopardizing plans, we would like to share the “tip of the iceberg” in regards to marketing work that will be set in motion soon.
- A complete rework of Bismuth bounties, primarily oriented around development and content for the Bismuth platform. We believe one of the ways to fast-track building value on Bismuth is to initially offer a monetary incentive. The Bismuth Foundation is quite experienced in proper utilization of development funds, so individuals expecting to take advantage of the bounty programme with subpar work won’t be credited. Among development bounties, there will be bounties for social content, which hopefully will incentivize the top content creators across all media platforms to help Bismuth gain more exposure within the industry.
- Extensive marketing efforts are being coordinated within the internal agenda. In the future as other work falls into motion- such as the completed documentation and tutorials- we plan to make the first marketing pushes outside of the cryptocurrency industry. These plans are in a preliminary state.
Content
- We recently celebrated our 2nd year. A blog post briefly summarizing our history and future visions can be found here.
- A tutorial video made to assist with importing a legacy wallet.der into the Tornado wallet can be found here.
Tornado Wallet
This has been a big month for the Bismuth Tornado Wallet, in which numerous requested features were implemented as well as a couple of bugs were hammered out. The changelog below has the details. The dev branch is where you can see this version, official release and install packages will be announced as soon as they are ready.
General
- It’s now easier to run the wallet on Android- with a single click, see here for more information. Credits to a volunteer from Discord for the work.
- Added new calls to the wallet core and servers, to ease the jobs of dApp and Crystal developers. Calls leverage “operation” and “data” fields with optimized, hence fast queries.
- Added new factorized js code helpers for Crystals.
Requested Features
- Implemented static route, local to each Crystal, for images and custom js code.
- Implemented protection against messageless transactions, to known exchange addresses.
- Implemented sum of all address balances for user view.
- Implemented copy TXID on click.
- Implemented link to help/FAQ in footer section.
- Implemented symbol to ID current active addresses.
- Implemented usage for server time with transactions, and avoid rejected transactions from unsynced PCs or mobile devices.
- Implemented capability to import encrypted wallet.der file.
- Implemented pagination on transaction list page.
- Implemented ability to show aliases.
- Implemented meta information and more context in the Crystals list.
Bugfixes
- Fixed pt-br, language now working.
- Fixed broken form fields- acknowledgement to a Twitter user for troubleshooting the issue.
Crystals
- Added new Crystal designed to protect intellectual property within the Bismuth blockchain- more information and official name will be available soon.
Research and mid-term development
- We are investigating reports of instability in regards to the uptime of specific Hypernodes. More information will be available at a later date.
- We are looking into mobile wallet development. In early stages of research and planning.
- More work on hardware wallet integration is ongoing.
- BIP compatibility has been largely improved, enabling users and developers to have a similar feel to Bitcoin and the altcoin ecosystem when interacting with BIS. New addresses are BIP 32 & 44 compatible.
- Analyzing the consequences of using hybrid addresses. Tests, benchmarks, and specs will soon be published.
- Implemented and tested an abstract class and module for hybrid address signing operations.