This Week In TurtleCoin (Feb 25, 2019)

Posted on Published by RockSteady

Finally! Unless you’ve been under a rock somewhere you might have noticed something the last day or so. Coming by a block without about a thousand transactions waiting to get in it ahead of you was pretty tough if you were trying to sync a wallet yesterday. Kind of makes you wonder, was this an attack or was TRTL suffering from an inability to tolerate any and all types of traffic?

Both, is your answer. Like we’ve said before, this is far from the worst we’ve seen, but any time transactions are slowed down and mining is impacted, we have to jump into action…. And action is what took place! Keeping with tradition, we released a hot patch, courtesy of Zpalmtree which effectively limits the amount of “extra data” you can tack on to a transaction. Everything that needs to fit in a transaction will still fit in a transaction after the patch takes place, just with less wiggle room for any BS.

Thanks for your patience while we got things cleared up 😀 and now for our developer updates…

Developer Updates

There is a pending fork upgrade in 9 days, if you care about transactions flowing as fast as usual, please make sure you’ve updated to help push out spam attacks like these in the future –

Japawolf Meetup – Japakar and greywolf’s rescheduled meetup was a great success! There was some hardware exchanged – some video adapters for this (https://turtlenode.co/img/colorswitching-turtle.gif), and Japakar got a handful of TurtleCoin stickers that Browns1964Champs sells. greywolf wore his TurtleCoin t-shirt from DonMatus on Amazon. Most of the convo was about TurtleCoin: challenges of non-devs to setup and keep running a public node (including the good and bad of using the HA wrapper vs just simply making a script of commands), the pros and cons of various wallets currently in use, the great camaraderie in the community, and the quality and abundance of spot-on support from so many friendly turtles. They also talked a little DeroGold chatter; different techniques in web hosting; comparison between hosting services, with and without VPS; and a little normie shit. – Japakar & greywolf

TurtleCities – We are growing quickly at 45 current users and plenty more on the waiting list 🙂 Just a reminder for those on the waiting list, if you want to move up to the front of the line, just hop in discord and talk to RockSteady and if you ask nicely you can have a free account too. What is TurtleCities? Well, a lot of us old tortoises used to use a service called Geocities in the early days to make free homepages to show our flashy gifs to our friends and share our embarrassing music preferences, so we thought it’d be cool to have something similar for TRTL users and we named it TurtleCities. You get 1 floppy disk worth of space to express yourself to your heart’s content. You’d be surprised what people have done with their pages! We also offer paid services like linux shell accounts and dual density floppy storage, with a 100% no-money-back guarantee on service quality and outages. You can’t beat it, folks.

Thinkpol’s page – http://pages.turtlecoin.lol/~thinkpol/

Tgroh007’s page – http://pages.turtlecoin.lol/~tgroh007/

PeteOnealJr’s Page – http://pages.turtlecoin.lol/~peteonealjr/

Emperor’s Page – http://pages.turtlecoin.lol/~emperor/

Wesley’s Page – http://pages.turtlecoin.lol/~wesley/

My page – http://pages.turtlecoin.lol/~rocksteady/

The Great Spam Incident of 2019 – For those who skim, the top part mentioned briefly a spam attack. If you’d like, here’s a grossly exaggerated and satirized sequence of events, sponsored by TMZ.

The last day or so, someone was uploading 0.1 TRTL transactions by the hundred, which were packed to the brim with the same nonsense data over and over, and a picture of a red mario shell with the little yellow points above it. We lol’d, then we cried. It disrupted the flow of transactions because the transaction pool quickly swelled to almost 10k transactions that we had to chew through in order to get through it all. In a perfect world that’s no problem for our network, we have really fast blocks that are pretty stretchy, but this time that fought us somewhat as I also mentioned the transactions were filled with trash. In two days we added a few hundred megabytes to the chain, and had a taste of what mainstream adoption would mean volumewise on-chain.

A hot patch was pushed out first to our biggest block producers to get them to agree to stop pushing nonsense, or as little nonsense as possible with the transactions in their blocks. We don’t want to deny that traffic, we just don’t think someone should be able to pack the traffic full of trash that we have to carry for all of history. We did this by limiting the size of something called TX_Extra, which is similar to the OP_Return field if you’re familiar with BTC and how extra data works in their transactions. Typically what goes in this field is a payment ID, or an encrypted chat message, or whatever you want to put in there evidently.

The turtle shell gif was funny, but the network choked as our smallest daemons were tapping out as their mempools started flooding. Each daemon has a record of the transactions it sees waiting in line for processing, and at a certain point the size of that waiting list can cause them to shut down. For some reason, nobody knows why, this almost never affects Windows daemons, as much as that hurts to say. As things reached a fever pitch, the biggest block producers had implemented the fix and we began chopping through the weeds to clear out the work (we currently sit with 2 transactions in the pool as I write this) things started to show signs of calming down.

Fuckery, Act II – Well, as one might ask, what happens when someone splits their entire stack into a mountain of little tiny pennies (pennii?), well of course, they have to convert them back into dollar bills don’t they?

Enter TRTL’s second Achilles Heel, the fusion transaction backlog, AKA the Coinstar of Death.. When someone needs to make a transaction consisting of a lot of inputs, the wallet might try to “fuse” some of those to turn the little pennies into dollars. We’ve done articles about this in the past, so it’s not a new concept and it helps us a lot, and usually any slowness in the chain is usually a large exchange doing a full fusion optimize on their wallet. Unfortunately constantly cranking out the spam-pennies for two days straight means you have a LOT of pennies to turn back into dollars, and they’re limited as to how many can be converted in each block by a ratio set in the code. To make matters worse, we have the same issue we mentioned before because these fusions tend to flood the transaction pool with at times *thousands* of transactions.

More chewing ensued. Much patience was had by the community as the miners strapped their hardhats on and went to work yet again to clear out the weeds, and many hours later here we are. Core team’s going to hibernate for a day or some and come back with some updates that have a bit more finality to them rather than being a patch. Thanks for your patience and help in getting this fixed 🙂 – TRTL Core Team

Bounty Hunters!

10,000 TRTL – Write a guide on mining TRTL on an iOS phone with the app XMR Miner. Must be modeled after existing guides, I can give a hand wherever needed! – Sajo8

200-700 TRTL per fix – Help correct information or fix broken links in the turtlecoin docs! Bounty depends on information fixed, feel free to contact me for more info – Sajo8

Easy Beginners For Devs

Want to get your feet wet being a developer at TRTL? Here’s a list of issues in our core Github repo that Zpalmtree has marked as “Good First Issues” which are easy low hanging fruit for people to earn their pink Developer role in Discord. Here is a link and brief description just in case you’re interested!

Add RPC method to validate address
https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin/issues/733 Continue Reading →

This Week In TurtleCoin (Jan 21, 2019)

Posted on Published by RockSteady

Developer Updates

cryptonote-nodejs-pool – I’ve just finished updating the pool software for the upcoming fork, building on the fine work of the Plenteum developers. Check it out in action at fork-o-clock, over at https://trtl.heigh-ho.funkypenguin.co.nz 🙂 – funkypenguin

https://github.com/funkypenguin/cryptonote-nodejs-pool

Mobile Wallet – Hello, Not sure when I last gave an update. I have done most of the work on the wallet backend, and now I am starting on the mobile app UI. It’s a lot easier to find bugs when you start actually making the wallet. This probably will be the easiest part of making the wallet, but I’m not great at design so it’s a little slow. I’m not sure how tricky it is to get iOS wallet apps onto the App Store these days – I was under the impression they didn’t allow them, but I did recently see another relatively small crypto who had got a wallet on there. Fortunately react native supports iOS, so once the Android is done, I will certainly look into it. Not a massive fan of the license fee you have to pay, nor do I have an iOS device for testing… but at least we won’t have to write much more code. Thanks to iburnmycd for his turtlecoin-utils module – This has taken a decent amount of the hard bits of code to write off my shoulders. I recently also added support for syncing via the TurtlePay blockchain cache API in the backend – (https://docs.turtlepay.io/blockapi/) – currently this isn’t much faster than a daemon, however, I think it will probably have much better uptime, which should help avoid people wondering why their wallets are not syncing. – Zpalm

https://github.com/zpalmtree/ton-chan

TRTLfarm – TRTLfarm is an online virtual farming game build on top of TRTL.services by Boris. People can buy farm animals with TurtleCoin, which return produce based on their programmed production speed. The game started out as a small project, but has blown up quickly. Boris has working hard past few days and just finished implementing a leaderboard where turtles can track their rank. While I will giving the UI a touchup, Boris will be working on a surprise! Join us in the discord to discuss development and provide feedback! https://discord.gg/X7b7GWW – fexra

https://trtlfarm.com

WalletShell – Got help from very nice friends, who was willing to help me debugging and provides a tested macOS build. New macOS build is available here: https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtle-wallet-electron/releases/download/v0.3.7/WalletShell-v0.3.7-mac.dmg It’s confirmed to be working, but was only lightly tested and there may be bugs slips here & there. So if you happened to found one, please file a bug report on github. Thanks to @greywolf & @Messier_45 for your help! – labaylabay

GUI interface based on Walletd for TurtleCoin
https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtle-wallet-electron
54 forks.
21 stars.
3 open issues.
Recent commits:

Continue Reading →

This Week In TurtleCoin

Posted on Published by RockSteady

Developer Community Updates

WalletShell GUI Wallet – With v0.3.3 release, WalletShell, the TRTL Gui Wallet has been declared stable and ready for public use to manage your TRTL assets. Since its last introduction, WalletShell has fixes lots of known bugs & glitches, performance & features enhancements, and lots of new features, here are some of them:
– Address book, which can be looked-up when you send/transfer TRTL, help avoid mistakes on typing/pasting recipient address
– Fast transaction history listing/sorting/searching
– Keyboard only operation, with help of keyboard shortcut & keyboard friendly inputs.
– Public node list, fetch daily from https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin-nodes-json/blob/master/turtlecoin-nodes.json.
-For node operator: You don’t need to worry that your node domain name starts with “z”, node list order will be randomized everytime user accessing node setting page, so each nodes has a relatively fair chance to be on top of the list.
– You can now export your transactions history to csv files for your reporting need. You can choose to export all transaction or to only export incoming or outgoing transaction.
– Desktop Notification for Incoming Transfer.
– Fusion tx to help you optimize your wallet inputs/outputs.
– WalletShell now have new Night/Dark theme, and is sets as default, you can still easily switch to Light/Green mode if you prefer
– Realtime node & network status monitoring: it will let you know and pause the sync process whenever the node you’re trying to connect can’t be reach, or when your machine disconnected from network.
– Utility: PaymentID and Integrated Address generator is there when you need it.
For more complete feature lists, please visit the Github repo here: https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtle-wallet-electron
Get latest release here: https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtle-wallet-electron/releases
TLDR; WalletShell, as of now, is the most feature packed Desktop GUI Wallet for TurtleCoin -:) -labaylabay

https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtle-wallet-electron

TurtleCoin Test Suite – It takes a lot of effort to test all of the RPC calls to TurtleCoind and turtle-service each release. As anyone can tell you, give a lazy man a task and he’ll find an easy way to do it. Given this bit of wisdom, check out turtlecoin-test-suite written in Node.js for quick and simple RPC testing for those of us that want to spend more time coding and less time testing. – IBurnMyCD

https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin-test-suite

TRTL-CLI-py – I added a pools function! Use po or pools and get a full list of all the pools. Use po <name> and you’ll get detailed statistics of that pool! If you havent heard yet, there’s also a nodes ( or no) function! – Sajo8

https://github.com/turtlecoin/trtl-cli-py

Turtle Simulator – Version 0.2 is out now! Just a small update for you all! Various reported bugs have been fixed and a few new features added! The main addition is the Day and Night system so now we can add custom events on different days! Enjoy and as always email me at “trtl.simulator@gmail.com” or drop into the TRTL discord if you have any queries or ideas for the project! Thanks for all your support! – Oiboo

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lPJ3m6_BCTO3sUcG07OKJsXnlA25sx9e

TurtleEDU – For all 62 of you Students out there who enrolled in the beta program at TurtleEDU this week, thank you! For all of you who haven’t, you type *student in the chat and you’ll be given access to the EDU channels and you’ll be part of the Beta testers crew.
If you’re wondering what TurtleEDU is, here’s the details: We’re setting up TurtleEDU to help the community become more knowledgeable as users, and help people who want to know about dev stuff have an easy route to being a TRTL dev. If you type *student you get the student role and access to #edu-general and #edu-help channels. We’re teaching classes of real-world portable skills, but using TurtleCoin as the core example in each lesson, so the first thing you learn how to do when you become a developer is how to interact with our blockchain. – RockSteady

First class goes live for everyone on Dec 9!

Community Advertisements

TRTL-STORE launched as a webstore that shows all prices in TRTL, and only accepts TRTL as payment. We have T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, artwork, and draw-string backpacks for sale in your favorite crypto. Use coupon code TURTLETURTLE for 10% off until October 25th. https://trtl-store.com/

Hey all you turtles! Everyone is starting up their own public node so here’s another one for you all. The site has a dark theme so it’s easy on the eyes and the fee is only 1 TRTL! Whether you need a wallet to sync or an API to test, connect to my public node over at xaznode.com!

dsmash.turtlenode.online – a public node with plenty of resources waiting to be used, so that syncing your wallet will go as quickly as possible! The node fee is 69 TRTL per transaction.

0.25 node fee @ turtlenode.co – managed by greywolf³˜ – thanks for connecting

Fork Watch!

This is a new article segment we are doing to promote those who’ve forked TurtleCoin to make their own projects. Hopefully this gives new forks a good foot forward! Feel free to post your fork for next week’s roundup here, or create your own fork with our easy guide here

Name of your TRTL fork – Xaria

Github link for your code – https://github.com/xaria-coin/

What is special or new about your network? – 

Xaria is a not for profit coin that aims to help those in need by donating funds from its premine to charities & good causes.

Name of your TRTL fork – Monkeytips

Github link for your code – https://github.com/monkeytips/monkeytips

What is special or new about your network? 
Monkeytips has been around for 4 months now and has steadily increased its followers since conception. Very humble beginnings as just a joke of a coin, monkeytips has become something the community has really rallied behind. Only 250 million max supply, monkeytips is a hot new cryptocoin with a very low total of atomic units having only 2 decimals. We wanted to share the monkeytips love with everyone so recently SoreGums helped code a rainmonkey to rain monkeytips on people in our discord chat! Join up for some fun 🙂 discord.gg/EAaKcCy

 

Name of your TRTL fork – FRED

Github link for your code  – https://github.com/fredenrg/FRED

What is special or new about your network? 
An increasing population and the industrialization of emerging economies will have a huge impact on future global energy demands and the environment. The FRED Project is aimed at promoting the benefits of alternative energy generation at the consumer level. We believe this will help to reduce the associated environmental impacts of fossil fuel energy generation, and the effects of energy price increases on the consumer due to demand. In addition to promoting consumer energy generation, we are also exploring the possibilities of future alternative and free energy devices. The term “free energy” may sound impossible and some readers may have already run for the hills, but we believe there are devices out there (although not totally free) that have the potential to become mainstream. Why fork TurtleCoin? The reason for choosing TurtleCoin as our base fork was due to the incredible collaboration between the developers and the community. We believe TurtleCoin will be one of the most well developed and feature rich cryptonote coins. We are also looking for contributors of all levels, in all areas of development and promotion. http://fredenergy.org

Name of your TRTL fork – 2ACoin

Github link for your code – https://github.com/2acoin

What is special or new about your network? – Lower overall # of Blocks (17.91 million), slower emission rate, 10% pre-mine which will be donated to the NRA over the next 10 Years.

Shoutouts & Thanks!

Anon – Alien is a big strong man and I want him to hold me close

rock – Shouts to Jerme for ForkMaps

Watt3r – Huge shoutout to Chris Crypto for doing so much so fast with his Paper wallet, 0.5 fee node, and dns service. Mad props!

if(true) – Nobody expects the spanish inquisition or critical HDD failures.

greywolf³˜ – thanks to the tooth fairy Turtley McTurtleton McDrizzle for keeping my pillow stuffed with turtles
Rogerrobers – Shout out to rocksteady!

aneki – Fexra- Great job on the web wallet and trtl-services!! Continue Reading →