This week we tightened up our turkey gravy recipes as well as our core software while we reflected on how thankful we are to have such a talented community. Read on to find out more!
Developer Updates
This is a place where anybody in our community can submit a post about the TRTL project they’re working on. It’s a great way to attract helpers for your project and show people what to keep an eye out for. We encourage you to show works in progress as well as finished products, as we’re happy to see them all and it shows that we’re an active community.

TurtleCoin Crypto Hackathon 2019
We have 15 Million TRTL looking for a new home, and have 24 teams so far who’ve signed up for the TurtleCoin Crypto Hackathon 2019 (Signups open until December 1), and so far of those 24, 9 have left their details to be contacted during the hackathon for an article about their projects. That’s a great turnout, and a surprisingly even balance between devs and non-devs.
https://crypto-hackathon.com/
We are excited to thank the following teams for their participation: ZenTurtles, Why Canti Think of a Team Name, Hero’s in a Half Shell, MobileTortile, Lord_Enzo, that turtle, Kurdîstan, Born without a shell, Spanner Pouch, Hashterisk, AMC, JS TRTLz, TeamXenth, hebeblock, E Squad, Kick Ass Turts, Psychotic Silverfish, MXZ, Save the Turtles, eyegenvalue, termek, Oiboo Games, Double-O-Seven, ninja
Raw blocks syncing
This week I’ve been working on adding raw block syncing to wallets. So far I’ve just added it to zedwallet and wallet-api. Currently, when syncing wallets, the daemon collects blocks and transactions from the database, deserializes it, and dumps it out to JSON. The wallet then parses that JSON and processes the blocks.
With this patch, the daemon instead returns the unparsed, raw blocks from the database as JSON. We then perform the deserialization in our wallet, and then process the blocks.
The advantage of this is two-fold. The first one is that generally wallets are waiting on the daemon to supply more data, rather than busy processing blocks. This new RPC call is a lot faster to complete than the current one, and so when the daemon is serving lots of wallets, it means that the wallets will spend less time waiting to retrieve data, and more time processing blocks, which means faster sync times.
The second advantage is that the raw blocks are much more compact than the full block data in JSON, so data usage will be decreased.
The next step is to add this feature to the JS backend so TonChan and Proton can benefit from it.
Zpalm
TonChan v1.0.2
Small TonChan release going out today. It fixes a bug where you were unable to sync past a particularly huge block.
Also fixes a bug with node swapping when you changed screens before the node swap completed.
Finally, it fixes QR codes not populating the amount to send correctly in some scenarios.
As always, you can view the full set of changes on GitHub: https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin-mobile-wallet/compare/v1.0.1…v1.0.2
Zpalm

Moving Up!
It’s always good to be recognized! These are the people who gained new roles in the community this week!
Service Operator – Miner.rocks, zhang
Reporter – Khorosho!
Tester – rollinghavoc
Good First Issues
Good First Issues are tickets that are marked as ‘easy wins’ for new developers. If you want to be a TurtleCoin Developer, these are great tasks to start with!
- Use matches property in ApiDispatcher regex #862
https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin/issues/862 - Remove no longer relevant asserts #811
https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin/issues/811 - Utilise /getblocks and client side serialization for faster syncing #54
https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin-wallet-backend-js/issues/54
Rig Of The Week
Do you have a TRTL mining rig you want to show off? Tell us about it!

Bounty Watch!
This is an easy way to make a few TRTL!
50,000 “Make a TurtleCoin Christmas Themed Logo! This will be used for the discord server icon. The deadline is the 30th November, 11:59pm GMT.
To see more details, and the entries so far, check out the pinned message in the #bounties channel in discord.” zpalm
Free Advertising
This is a spot to spam anything TurtleCoin related that you would like to advertise, it’s free to put an ad in the roundup.
- Hello. My name is Kevin, owner of SpookyPool.nl. My goal with SpookyPool is to create a great community with fun people and having a nice chat about crypto and other stuff. Having TurtleCoin in my pool since a while ago has been fun. Learned alot of new things and meet alot of new people. I would like to ask u to join the community of SpookyPool by mining TurtleCoin or some other currency! http://trtl.spookypool.nl
- Please support the muxdux turtlecoin mining pool – Active Discord with great people, very low pool and tx fees, great hardware infrastructure https://trtl.muxdux.com
Shoutouts & Thanks
This is the place to mention someone in the community who has done something nice or deserves recognition.
- Japakar pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
- Japakar Thanks all to the community as always! You guys are great!
- Turtley McTurtleton McDrizzle Hi there!
- japakar.com You guys are awesome! Vury nice. She is my sister.
- rock thankful that we spent this year together
and one last thing..
Earlier today, the question was asked in the Discord chat what everyone was thankful for this year. We said we’d publish them on the roundup, so here they are, in no specific order.
TurtleCoin Core Goals
Fun, Fast, and Easy
For those of you that have been to the TurtleCoin website, the goals below may seem repetitive. For those of you that do not know, TurtleCoin was born with a few goals in mind:
The community is reminded of these goals every time they interact with the network, participate in discussions, and help spread TurtleCoin around the globe. These core values drive everything that is done within the community from core development, documentation generation, learning opportunities, support, and community project management. We take these goals very seriously and will do whatever we can to make sure that TurtleCoin remains true to the initial vision.
Decentralization of Mining Resources
What is Decentralization?
Decentralization is, to put it plainly, the process by which planning, and decision making are shifted away from a central authority or group. The process can take many forms but in our case in the context of a Proof of Work (PoW), it means that no central authority or group controls most of the resources needed to complete the PoW.
Why Care About Decentralization?
When most of the necessary resources to satisfy the PoW requirements end up centralized, those that control those resources can, when motivated to do so, take control of the network away from the community. Such control can manifest itself in ways such as:
Each of the above attack vectors result in a network that is no longer “Fun, Fast, and Easy”. These attacks are, in the eyes of many, fraud and in the very least theft. No one wants to use a network where their funds are constantly at risk.
In addition to the above sampling of on-chain attacks, centralization of mining resources also poses additional problems when those resources are controlled within, produced by, or otherwise restricted by one or two entities.
Where Does PoW Centralization Come From?
The most common forms of PoW centralization come from technologies designed to make PoW calculations more efficient, including:
ASICs and FPGAs are, to be fair, technologies that help secure PoW networks by increasing the overall hashrate of the network while drastically reducing the resources (electricity, physical space, management, monitoring, etc.) to do so. By increasing the efficiency of mining, others are encouraged to participate in the mining process. The more distributed hashrate a PoW network has, the harder it is to attack via the methods described above.
Supply Chain Centralization
Unfortunately, both ASICs and FPGAs are largely the product of a handful of special interest groups and organizations that create high barriers to entry and generally avoid transparency and accountability. This presents a problem in that a project that embraces these technologies today relies on just a few manufacturers to create the specialized ASICs and FPGAs needed to secure their blockchain.
While this may not sound like that big of a deal, all we have to do is think back to the countless instances in history where one group controlled the supply of a product or service.
Such centralization of manufacturing also presents a problem in that the production of ASICs and FPGAs for mining now falls under a limited number of jurisdictions. Governments could, and have, changed the legality of producing, owning, or operating such hardware on a moment’s notice. The fact that a single entity could control the hardware necessary for operating the network is in direct opposition of the goals of decentralization.
To prevent centralization of the manufacturing of the hardware there must be a multitude of manufacturers spread all over the globe. Only then is it possible to reduce the risk of a single group impacting the supply chain of ASICs and FPGAs.
Note: CPUs suffer from some of the same issues mentioned above; however, CPUs are general purpose integrated circuits that are commercially available in large quantities at affordable prices and their manufacturers are not solely focused on cryptocurrency mining activities.
TurtleCoin’s Commitment to Decentralization
The TurtleCoin community and core development team remains committed to the stance that TurtleCoin must be easy for all to mine, fair, open, and most importantly decentralized. We’ve posted numerous articles, videos, and GitHub threads reaffirming this commitment since the inception of the project. Notable examples of such include:
While others may deviate and split from their goals of decentralization, the TurtleCoin community remains fully committed to the vision that a decentralized PoW remains our best chance at long-term sustainability.
Upcoming Proof-of-Work Algorithm Change
The upgrade to CN Turtle at block 1,200,000 was a success; however, as mentioned in the Proof-of-Work Algorithm Change, we’ve had another algorithm change on the burner well before that upgrade. We always knew that CN Turtle would be a temporary step meant only to give us a bit of breathing room to test, what we hope to be, a PoW algorithm that will prevail in our quest for decentralization for longer than prior algorithms have allowed.
We have mentioned codename Chukwa in a few different places over the last few months. If you have not been following discussions in Discord or taken at look at the GitHub Chukwa Hashing Results thread, Chukwa is actually Argon2.
What is Argon2?
Argon2 is the memory hard winner of the 2015 Password Hashing Competition (PHC). Argon2 comes in three different versions; each with their own design goals.
The Argon2 IETF RFC draft recommends the use of Argon2id.
Why Argon2?
Argon2 was selected for the following reasons (in no particular order):
Argon2 is also relatively unique in that it allows for a high-level of customisation in how the hashes are calculated including parameters such as:
Argon2id Parameters
The various input parameters allow us to tune the implementation of Argon2 such that it makes sense for TurtleCoin.
Memory Requirement
Iterations
Parallelism (Threads)
1
thread per hashing operationBenchmark Testing Results
We solicited single-core performance benchmarks from the community in the Chukwa Hashing Results issue thread on the main repository. The summary of those results are below.
Note: For brevity, we have truncated the summary table below to the algorithms we have used before and Argon2 parameters that meet the requirements above.
Chukwa Parameters
Given the above requirements and the testing results provided by the community we were left with 5 clear options. One option stands out and sits nicely in the middle among the group of options. It provides a healthy 2.5x increase in hashrate and meets the requirements above.
We’ve selected the following Argon2id parameters for the next PoW:
Note: You can play with different parameters with a simple Argon2 hash generator at argon2.online
TurtleCoin’s Argon2 Implementation
Like other PoW algorithm changes, there is quite a bit of work to be done to ensure that this network upgrade is a success at block 1,800,000. We have adapted the Argon2 reference implementation for our use.
Caveats
Miner Package Availability
At this time, we have found very few miner packages that support Argon2id. While the native CPU miner provided in the core project will happily support the algorithm for solo mining, we understand that the network and community requires the availability of mining pools. To help facilitate pooled mining, we are currently working on building pool support into the native CPU miner provided by the project.
GPU Mining Support
We have not currently been able to find any miner packages that support Argon2id GPU mining. While we are confident that the community at large will work towards having an Argon2id GPU miner available at some point, it is unlikely that a GPU miner will be available at the time of the upgrade. As a result, we fully expect a substanial drop in the network hashrate as a result of this upgrade. We are planning a difficulty reset to account for this drop at the time of the upgrade. This has a byproduct of making TurtleCoin a CPU only coin for the foreseeable future.
Completed
Core
We have completed the necessary changes in the core project to implement Argon2id at block 1,800,000 that will activate with block major version 6. The changes can be found on the codename_chuckwa branch of the TurtleCoin repository. This code has not been pulled into the development tree or master as of the time of this writing.
Support Packages
The necessary changes have also been applied to the development branch of the turtlecoin-multi-hashing Node.js module that pools use to validate miner shares.
Pool Changes
The necessary changes to the turtle-pool software have been completed on the chukwa branch.
In Progress
Testnet
We will also be launching multiple testnets to test the algorithm change including a difficulty reset to adjust for the anticipanted loss of GPU mining hashrate.
How You Can Help
We need help from the community to test this algorithm change to try to ensure that everything goes as smoothly as possible. The more people that are involved, the easier it is to spot issues and correct for them before the upgrade.
Community Reminder
As always, be mindful of TurtleCoin core releases. Watch or star the main TurtleCoin repo to help stay abreast of changes and updates. Join Discord and read the #announcements on a regular basis. Or, sign up for the @news role by typing *news in the chat and be alerted whenever a new announcement is posted in Discord.
Make sure you’re ready for the network upgrade as early as possible. As with any network upgrade, prior versions of the software will no longer be compatible with the rest of the network after upgrade completion.
Remember that you too can participate in discussions regarding the direction of the project via Discord and the TurtleCoin Meta Issues. Join the discussing regarding the PoW change via the Chukwa: The Argon2 PoW Algorithm discussion on GitHub.