BISMUTH Team Progress Report – October 16 2019

Preamble

This month was packed full with development updates, a major exchange listing, an ongoing vote that decides the future of Bismuth’s emission schedule, and much more. Let’s delve below to find out more.

Core Node

This month was mainly focused on tests and stability tweaks to prepare for the upcoming stable release.

Hypernodes

This month saw significant stability and performance improvements to Hypernodes.

  • Update of old style sentinel to newest python3.7 versions.
  • Several incremental improvements to Hypernode, consensus and performance improvements.
  • Better startup sequence that auto fixes some broken chains.
  • Clean up of logs, aggregation, rational use of log levels. log output is less verbose and more useful.
  • Many safety checks added.
  • Auto handling of corrupted blocks from old or broken peers.
  • Efficient cache for the most computational intensive task, leading to significant performance improvement (by a 10 to 20 factor depending on the hardware).
  • Update of the upgrade script.
  • Hypernode v0.0.99i5 is out, current stable candidate on “beta99 branch”, upgrade is recommended.

Eco System

Bismuth team is delighted to see more third party developers kick in, built on Bismuth or just help improving existing code and add features. Thanks to them! @shadowcrypto @aravindballa @Endogen

  • First release of voting protocol specs, with code and tests.
  • Protocol update, python reference implementation and test vectors.
  • Client side Javascript library for easy access to vote protocol, whatever the wallet.
  • Html/js helper based on the js lib, to generate vote and reveal transactions client side (thanks @aravindballa).
  • Vanity ECDSA addresses generator for Polysign.
  • New “Zirco” command for Pawer bot from user @shadowcrypto.
  • New “Freebismuth” command for Pawer, and extra improvements, from user @shadowcrypto.
  • Voting Status generator for Voting stats, code and live jsons here and here.
  • Upgrade to BismuthClient module.
  • Bismuth Telegram tiping bot by user @Endogen.
  • Mobile Chameleon pay wallet now does support “operation” and “message” fields, allowing dapps and voting from the mobile wallet.
  • FreeBismuth update, tweet about $BIS and get free Bismuth!
  • Zircodice Dapp code update and added API.
  • Upgrade of most old dApps to make use of the BismuthClient module.

Media

Mainly new info on how to vote, don’t forget to cast you vote, everyone’s opinion matters when it’s a question of Bismuth’s future.

Academic Reference

New Academic reference: Bismuth was referenced in https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-31500-9_24

Bissias G., Thibodeau D., Levine B.N. (2019) Bonded Mining: Difficulty Adjustment by Miner Commitment. In: Pérez-Solà C., Navarro-Arribas G., Biryukov A., Garcia-Alfaro J. (eds) Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. DPM 2019, CBT 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11737. Springer, Cham

Exchanges

This month’s breaking announcement is the Hubi listing, that could open a whole new era for Bismuth exposure and liquidity- potentially onboarding tens of thousands of new users.

Hubi is consistently ranked in the top 25-50 of exchanges at Coinmarketcap with daily volumes of $200M or more. At the time of writing Hubi has only 34 active markets and 17 pairs involving BTC. Hence, BIS becomes a part of an exclusive group of cryptocurrencies with this listing.

Hubi: https://sso.hubi.com/register?code=0vb4l0 (team aff link)
Bismuth Ann: https://hypernodes.bismuth.live/?p=935
Hubi Ann: https://hkhbg.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035112451–Token-Listing-Hubi-will-launch-BIS-on-October-15

Research / Other

  • Work on stealth tokens.
  • Dev enquiries about Bismuth use for universal 2FA login use case.

I’m currently using Ethereum keys, but I’d like to know if it’s possible with Bis too, because bis code is so much more accessible thanks python 😉