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!
This Week in TurtleCoin (November 27, 2019)
The Quest for Decentralized Proof-of-Work
In this article, we will look at the some of the goals of the TurtleCoin project, the concept of centralization, where the project stands, and what the project is doing to remain true to itself by maintaining its commitment to the community.
This Week In TurtleCoin (Feb 25, 2019)
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
This Week In TurtleCoin (Feb 4, 2019)
Developer Updates
I’ve managed to get the TurtleCoin binaries to compile on Alpine. There were a couple of issues that were preventing this. The first issue is that ucontext was deprecated in POSIX which musl adheres to. Thankfully someone had created a library that solves the problem. The second issue was that musl has a PAGE_SIZE macro defined in limits.h that was conflicting with a parameter used on slow-hash.c. This has now been changed to page_size in the core, resolving the conflict. So far, I’ve created three images. The first image, which is meant to be a starting point for your own images, builds all the binaries in Alpine then copies them to a scratch container resulting in an image size of 22.6MB. The zedwallet container comes in at 7.96MB and the TurtleCoind image, which includes checkpoints, is only 90MB. I plan to create a series of docker-compose files that will tie them together to help accomplish various tasks. You can view the images on Docker Hub – Andrew | trtl.rocks
https://hub.docker.com/r/andrewnk/turtlecoin or on github: https://github.com/andrewnk/turtlecoin-docker
trtl-rocks – I’ve made several improvements and changes to the website. I made a silly logic error that caused the initial load time to vary drastically or stall altogether. If the node or pool API is not accessible, then it won’t be shown on the site. If you don’t see your node or pool in the list, this is most likely the reason. I’ve cleaned up the line chart, including formatting y-axis and point labels, which should help readability. I’ve added tooltips to most table headers that describe what the column represents. These can be turned on or off by toggling the Tooltips switch on the bottom right hand of the screen. Finally, I’ve added the ability to switch the line chart between live and historical data. On initial load, the live mode will be enabled and updates are displayed whenever the data is pushed from the database. I’m in the process of rewriting iburn’s blockexplorer-cache library to use sequelize, which will help me move on to the block explorer portion of the site. – Andrew | trtl.rocks
https://github.com/andrewnk/turtle-explorer
Turtle Simulator has now been uploaded to GitHub! If you want to help with the project, or if you if you are interested in game design, check out the code and give me a message in #Dev_gaming channel! Im looking for anyone who knows: 3d Modeling/ Animation/ UV maps. Coding in UE4, Blueprints or C++ Music /Audio Ideas / Level design It’s a massive project I’ve undertaken so any help takes something off my to-do list. Thanks in advanced! Looking forward to see what we can make together! Oiboo P.s No minimum skill level, all help will be appreciated! – Oiboo
https://github.com/Oiboo/TRTL-Simulator
Promote Your Bounty
500,000 TRTL – Currently I am seeking a pair of PHP hands that have the skill to implement some necessary connections to a particular API database, and implement it into a WordPress website. Not completely being able to foresee all the tasks but I believe it will be a one-time effort, realisable in a day, spread over two weeks. Please PM me for more information. – 476190.47619047
Community Advertising
Hey! I just wanted to remind you guys the best server to sync your wallet with is still turtlenode.online! Thanks! -Morpheus
Shoutouts & Thanks
Sups – Great support from Belorion in helping get the Nibblebox all in one miner running smoothly for NibbleClassic!
funkypenguin – Shoutout to @Rock’s new avatar, which is scary-as-hell (gah, i changed it before i saw this – rock)
anon – fuck you rock i know u read this
dsanon – <3 the turtlecoin community.
anonymous – will you go to prom with me zpalm
This Week In TurtleCoin (Jan 21, 2019)
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
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:
- Merge pull request #134 from rixombea/masterfind usable port instead fixed port for turtle-service, GitHub
- find usable port instead fixed port for turtle-service, rixombea
- Merge pull request #132 from rixombea/masteradd default filename for create/import dialog, GitHub
- add default filename for create/import, rixombea
- Merge pull request #131 from rixombea/masterexclude unsupported nodes (bc-cache nodes), GitHub
This Week in TurtleCoin (Jan 7, 2019)
It’s been one of the biggest weeks yet and we can’t wait to share our updates with you!
Every week that isn’t directly following a major drinking holiday we like to write an article like this to tell you about our progress over the past week to keep the community in-the-know about our projects. If you have project you’d like to tell us about, tell us about it and you will probably see your project featured in next week’s article!
Now that we’ve got that explanation out of the way, here’s what we worked on this week!
Developer Community
Who Sent 10 Turtle – Last week TurtlePay came out so I decided to try and learn how to accept TurtleCoin on a website with it!. After lots of learning and with the help from the Turtle community, the result can be seen in this little game I created: You send 10 TRTL to see who sent 10TRTL before you and what messages did they leave. I purposely made the app and design layout super simple (without even a DB) and open source, so people can contribute or hopefully fork it and open one page shops and apps accepting TRTL through right away. The code can be found here: https://github.com/mrrovot/one-page-turtlepay – mrrovot
https://whosent10turtles.info/
Oiboo’s Game Emporium – New Year New Look! I have been busy revamping Oiboo’s Game Emporium, some come and take a look… Over the Christmas break I have been inspired by TRTL EDU and created the “Learn” section. The first tutorial is an intro to “make games quick with open source code”. There are plans for more tutorials from other turtle creators in the community with more fun, exciting projects on the way. So come and play some games or learn how to make then yourself! As always, if you have a project you want featured or if you have any questions, contact me on “Info@games.turtacus.com” or message me direct on the Dev_Gaming Channel! – Oiboo
https://www.games.turtacus.com
TurtlePay – I’ve received some good feedback from a few different developers that are working with the platform. As a result, I’ve made a few tweaks to the core code behind the service this week.
1) Faster delivery of callback messages by disallowing the queue to stack up
2) Data payloads between workers are now encrypted using AES encryption to prevent tampering.
3) The public API now provides a ‘publicKey’ parameter that is generated for each request. All callback messages are being signed with the related ‘privateKey’ to provide verification that callbacks came from TurtlePay.
In addition, I’ve been working diligently on the documentation for the service. I hope to have that done in the next week. – IBurnMyCD
TRTL-Stak – TRTL-stak is back with vengeance! The latest release supporting CryptoNight Turtle is ready at https://github.com/turtlecoin/trtl-stak/releases/latest. Grab your copy today. Special shout out to @WhassupZA#2473 from Plenteum for the hard work he put in making this available for the community. – The Core
https://github.com/turtlecoin/trtl-stak
Thanks to Andehou from the chat who translated our ASIC article to Chinese! https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/73EaOn4ieWJE_N50ITPblA
From The Blog..
- https://blog.turtlecoin.lol/archives/cn-turtle-will-steal-your-girl/
This is an interview with IBMCD who is the development lead on the CN Turtle fork upgrade! - https://blog.turtlecoin.lol/archives/mining-turtles-in-spanish-interview-with-cryptohispano-of-bytecanarias/
We also interviewed Cryptohispano about TRTL mining in the Spanish speaking community.
Artwork by Teacup from the TRTL Network Discord
Community Advertising
https://trtl.nodes.pub – List of public TRTL nodes, automatically updated with fees, block height, etc.
https://trtl.muxdux.com – Our little pool is still looking to grow. Help us get our block times down and help decentralize the mining network.
https://TRTLfaucet.com – Tired of those lame old TurtleCoin faucets that throw ads at you, don’t always work, or provide you with a mere pittance? Come on over to TRTLfaucet.com where you can earn an infinite amount of TRTL just by completing a Captcha or setting it and forgetting it!
Shoutouts & Thanks
To any developers who are currently developing apps with turtle – I would love if you would try out my new API (https://www.futuregadget.xyz/api-docs/) – It’s a replacement for turtle-service, and it gives a bit of a friendlier, REST based interface. If you are having trouble getting it working or have any queries, let me know and I’ll be happy to help. – Zpalm
Thanks to Teacup and Warlord for providing awesome artwork for our publications. I hope you guys keep up the good work, it’s a nice visual touch. – Rock
Shouts out to Biolith and Roger who are both pushing their projects forward despite what people’s expectations were. – Rock
Im thankful for zpalm hes sexi oowwWoooo – Anon
Shoutout to Z. You make me whet with all your mad skillz. One day, I want to be with you. – Fexra
I can’t wait to be at the wedding. – Rock
This Week & Last Week in TurtleCoin (DEC 10th & 17th, 2018)
We got a little busy last week and a roundup article didn’t get written. Sorry for that, but there’s no time like the present to get this week’s article published!
Did you know you can type *news to get an alert every time we publish these articles? Try it! Go to the chat, and type *news
Developer Updates
TurtleCoin BLOC GUI Miner – (dec 10, 2018) BLOC GUI Miner is a wrapper for XMR-STAK and XMRIG and comes built-in with XMR-STAK. We are working on a new update for our BLOC GUI Miner to support more cryptonote coins and to make it easy for anyone to update a coin or to add-edit a mining pool and much more. The 1st one to be added is TurtleCoin The main interface display the most important informations and links regarding TurtleCoin. We are collecting the data from CoinGecko for each coin and store it into a database where the BLOC GUI Miner has access using a private API. We still have to polish the exchanges stats on the left currently not displaying the right data. But everything else is working. This project is open source so anyone is able to contribute by adding/editing their own mining pools directly using the BLOC GUI Miner GitHub rep as soon as we launch the new version in the next few days. We also have added list of website from the TRTL network, social networks, Coin informations with Price, Network status and more. All the informations are contain in a single file called content.json makes it very easy for everyone to contribute to it. Any feedback is welcome before the official release in few days. Thank you! – FuriousTeam
(dec 17 2018) – First we would like to say a thank you to everyone for the great feedback we got from the previous release. Some users reported us not to be able to start the BLOC GUI Miner on different systems. We spent the last 3 days improving the miner and today we are happy to announce that the new version is fully compatible with all Windows (7 and 10), macOS (Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave) and Linux (14.04, 16.04, 18.04) operating system. Also there was another problem with macOS users with the last build. We found out that XMR-STAK require Xcode and microhttpd dependencies and this is mandatory. Installing such dependencies can be challenging for some users. For this reason we switched the BLOC GUI Miner macOS version to XMRIG as it is included as a bundle so macOS users will not require to installing anything else beside the actual BLOC GUI Miner. This version should work smoothly. Again we are looking for your feedbacks. This is the most important for us. Feedbacks keep us alive. Thank you. What’s new in 0.0.3 ? BLOC GUI Miner v0.0.3 comes with XMR-STAK 2.7.1 or XMRIG 2.8.3 already built-in, including configuration files for CPU and GPU mining in most of the cases. – Added XMRIG full support for all current and future coins – Fixed content.json file (that cause a major crash on the previous version) – Updated XMR-STAK with latest official binaries v2.7.1 – Replaced XMR-RIG for macOS – 7 binaries available for Windows, macOS, Linux v0.0.3 update details: https://github.com/furiousteam/BLOC-GUI-Miner/releases/tag/v0.0.3 BLOC GUI Miner Github: https://github.com/furiousteam/BLOC-GUI-Miner How to install on windows: https://wiki.bloc.money/mining/BLOC-GUI-Miner-using/#windows How to install on macOS: https://wiki.bloc.money/mining/BLOC-GUI-Miner-using/#mac-os How to install on Linux: https://wiki.bloc.money/mining/BLOC-GUI-Miner-using/#linux How to mine TurtleCoin: https://wiki.bloc.money/mining/bloc-gui-miner-using/#mining-turtlecoin-trtl BLOC GUI Miner is a beautiful, easy to use, Graphical User interface for mining multiple cryptocurrencies based on cryptonote. It is aimed at getting people that have never tried mining before with a focus on accessibility, security and simplicity. BLOC GUI Miner support two very popular miner backends: xmr-stak and xmrig BLOC GUI Miner comes with XMR-STAK 2.7.1 and XMRIG 2.8.3 already built-in, including configuration files for CPU and GPU mining in most of the cases. Some antivirus packages detect cryptocurrency miners as malware and will remove the miner as soon as it’s started. In order for the BLOC GUI miner to function, you’ll need to exclude the miner from being scanned by your antivirus software. Download and install BLOC GUI Miner for Windows, Mac and Linux from GitHub Everyone can add their own cryptocurrency to the BLOC GUI Miner as long as it is supported by XMR-STAK and XMRIG. In the same time everyone can add/edit a mining pool into the BLOC GUI Miner. More details here: https://github.com/furiousteam/BLOC-GUI-Miner/tree/master/coins Much more is coming soon. – FuriousTeam
https://github.com/furiousteam/BLOC-GUI-Miner
lite-blocks – The testnet is going good so far.. we have achieved more than 95% reduction in size of the block being propogated.. some more testing and then you all can benefit from this new feature.. If I am thinking right then following are the benefits/advantages
1. less bandwidth usage for those who are running nodes 24/7
2. takes less time to reach more nodes compared to current situation
3. from the above point we can also deduce that less orphans will be created
Also iburnmycd is writing an article entirely based on this feature.. I’m eager to see what he comes up with – Rashedmyt
https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin/pull/623
CN_Turtle Testnet – Now that PoW algo [1] has been announced for block 1,200,000 lets start testing it all out. The project needs some people to run some infrastructure (seed nodes, pool, explorer). We’ll also need some testers to send a few hundred hashes at it and check the miners are all OK as they get updated. In the next day or two we’ll be able to compile the testnet bits [2] and even just run straight from containers [3] then we’ll aim for an upgrade height for around midnight Saturday UTC specifically block 1,060,600. So anyone that wants to help out with infrastructure bits please ping me SoreGums#8071 in discord [4] to get added to #dev_testnet, everyone has access to view this channel if you’re curious as well. – soregums
[1] https://blog.turtlecoin.lol/archives/proof-of-work-algorithm-change/
[2] https://github.com/turtlecoin/testnet/tree/cntrtl-v2
[2] https://github.com/SoreGums/docker
[3] http://chat.turtlecoin.lol
https://github.com/turtlecoin/testnet/tree/cntrtl-v2
TurtleEDU – The first week of the beta-semester for TurtleEDU is underway! Our test-students have already found a bunch of bugs and corrections, and even a whole section I’d forgotten to upload. Current obstacles are still working out some kinks in the login/email system, thanks to Greywolf for your patience and help troubleshooting in the meantime. Overall, we’ve received positive remarks mostly, and plan to add more revisions to the class before proceeding with the next classes. We’d like to move in a logical order from newbie -> smart TRTL user, and then next we’d like to turn those smart TRTL users into qualified TRTL contributors! If you don’t know what that means, we’re going to be teaching you what you need to know to be able to get the pink role in the chat “contributor”. After that we’ll be moving into development classes so you can learn the way to earn a red “service operator” or bright pink “developer” role! Cowabunga! If you want to know more, go ahead and type *student in the chat to get your “student” role which gives you access to the EDU_NEWS channel in the chat, your source for all TurtleEDU news and announcements. – RockSteady
If you’d like to report an error or correction, please post it in this meta post: https://github.com/turtlecoin/meta/issues/133
If you’d like to check out TurtleEDU, here you go: http://edu.turtlecoin.lol
Community Advertisements
Turtle (TRTL) Mining Pool by modpool.org Pool Url: https://turtle.modpool.org/ Pool Fee: 0.8% Features: • PaymentID payments for exchanges, you can directly mine to an exchange that supports this feature • PaymentID, integrated address, subaddress supported • “Slush” payment system ( For details, please check “Payments” Menu) • Stats and hashrate chart per worker • Profit Calculator • E-mail notification when workers down • Pending Balance, Total Paid, Round contribution, Current Payout Estimate • Payment Histoy – Daily • Top 10 miners list • Average 1/6/24-hour Hash Rate • Discord channel : https://discord.gg/JW3VJfs • Telegram channel: https://t.me/modpoolorg
It’s that time of year again! To celebrate the holiday’s, turtlenode.online is laying down a special price. Check it out.
New GUI for NibbleClassic! NBXleather linux edition https://github.com/Sudosups/NBX-GUI/releases
Join the the ducks in finding turtles. My pool is based on the west coast of the USA. 0.1% fee – https://trtl.muxdux.com
TurtleCoin Bounties
2,000 TRTL – Image of a Turtle School – Sajo8
25,000 TRTL – Integrate TurtleCoin into Keybase client software – if(true)
1,000 TRTL – video about how to make pub node. – thcmaster
250,000 – Integrate Trezor T as auth/login method into the NEST wallet – Elkim
Fork Watch!
Name of your TRTL fork:
Aeon Classic
Github link for your code:
https://github.com/Biolith/Aeon-Classic
What is special or new about your network?
Privacy Oriented With A Mobile Focus
Decentralized digital currency is slowly becoming a normal part of everyday life. Yet everybody’s main internet device continues to be their cellphone, a device with a low-powered CPU and limited available storage. Aeon Classic is about enabling this era, enabling an age where all people everywhere have the freedom to privately send and receive money with whatever gadget they already own.
Aeon Classic team is pleased to announce an android application for shellnet based webwallets. We will be adding additional features in the future.
https://github.com/Biolith/android-wallet-wrapper/releases
Shoutouts & Thanks
Rock – Rashed, great job on lite-blocks, this will really help the network! I hope your bounty was a fun prize to receive! I’m proud of your work.
anon – shoutout to kev and beary for being awesome
Rock – Big thanks to Uran and the TurtleCoin China team out there translating our weekly roundup articles to Chinese for our people in the East! As a global project, it is important to us to reach all segments of the community to help our neighbors who speak other languages. I encourage all of you who are part of international communities to follow their example and spread the word to those in your neighborhood. Hello China!! 🙂
Rogerrobers – Shout to chef and capetn keep up the good wrkz work!
Rock – Thanks to FuriousTeam for including us in their GUI miner work, this should help out a lot of new Turtles who want to get started mining.
Morpheus – Happy Birthday, TurtleCoin! Congrats’ and well done to everyone who played a part in making TurtleCoin the success it is! Radical, Duuudes!
Rock – CN Turtle is something I can’t wait to see in action, thanks to IBMCD for your work, and thanks to everyone who helped test it.
Mufalo – shoutout to fexra and birfday boi, nice work with edu turtle, lets grow!
Rock – Thanks to my partner Fexra for helping out with TurtleEDU! and thanks to the students who are in our first beta semester finding bugs for the EDU team! Thanks Greywolf for helping troubleshoot our login and email system.
Proof-of-Work Algorithm Change
The core development team has observed the fact that the network hash rate has climbed substantially over the last few weeks. Luckily, the hashrate has remained rather decentralized and balanced over the large number of pools that the community operates. However, the significant increase in hashrate has made it more difficult for the project to meet one of its core goals. To remain mineable for everyone. After careful consideration, we believe it’s once again time to perform a soft fork to a new Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm.
Such a change is not taken lightly, and we’ve given considerable thought to where the project should go in this regard. We’ve seen a few networks using CryptoNight Soft Shell variants with success. Although considerable work has been done to support Soft Shell pools and the like we’re not quite ready to move over to Soft Shell just yet.
You’re probably asking yourself, “So what’s the plan?”
Supported PoW Algorithms
If you’ve read through the TurtleCoin fork guide, forked TurtleCoin yourself, or have read through the code, the next few statements are going to come to no surprise to you.
We like to collect PoW algorithms like they are pogs. The more you have, the more fun you’re having with your friends.
Keeping this in mind, TurtleCoin currently has built-in support for no less than twelve (12) different PoW algorithms. Yes, you read that right, twelve.
They are, in no particular order:
- CryptoNight v0
- CryptoNight v1
- CryptoNight v2
- CryptoNight Lite v0
- CryptoNight Lite v1
- CryptoNight Lite v2
- CryptoNight Turtle v0
- CryptoNight Turtle v1
- CryptoNight Turtle v2
- CryptoNight Soft Shell v0
- CryptoNight Soft Shell v1
- CryptoNight Soft Shell v2
Woah, Wait, What’s CryptoNight Turtle?
To put it mildly, CryptoNight Turtle is a tweak to the standard CryptoNight family that significantly increases the speed at which hashes can be computed. This is accomplished in two ways.
Iteration Change
We’re dropping the iteration count in fourth as well. From 524,288 iterations to 131,072 iterations. This will result in the base hashrate increasing for every miner.
Scratch Pad Change
We’re dropping the scratch pad size in fouth. From 1MB (CN Lite) to 256KB. Why? because we want to make everything go faster and when we’re dropping the iteration count, we need to make sure that the scratchpad is used effectively to prevent some interesting attack vectors.
Faster? Doesn’t That Mean an Even Higher Network Hash Rate?
It sure does! There’s a reason for what appears to be chaos and we’re just getting to the good part.
TurtleCoin Major Block v5
As you’re likely thinking, “This doesn’t sound better, no, no, these guys are crazy…”
Block Major version 5 is planned to activate CryptoNight Turtle v2. That’s right, variant 2. Those of you following other projects using v2 likely know that there is a performance penalty incurred by variant 2 hashing. We’ve personally seen a performance hit of anywhere from 12% to 45% on some hardware. We think that’s unacceptable; however, we do like the premise behind variant 2.
To balance the performance impact of variant 2 out, we’re going to hash faster with CryptoNight Turtle. The two effectively cancel each other out and we gain the benefit of soft forking away from potential ASIC/FPGA/etc. miners. As a matter of fact, you’ll see a hashrate increase on your miner(s) because of the move to CryptoNight Turtle.
The move to variant 2 will help strengthen TurtleCoin’s ASIC/FPGA resistance. Future PoW changes will also be designed to further strengthen the project’s ASIC/FPGA resistance to try to keep TurtleCoin mineable for everyone.
Doing Your Part
We’re confident that we have the core code ready for the soft fork to CN Turtle tentatively scheduled for block 1,200,000. The main pool software has been updated to support it as well as the underlying Node.js Hashing Library and the Node.js Cryptonote Library have been updated.
There’s still work to be done and any community assistance is, as always, appreciated.
Test Network
We’ll 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.
Miner Support
We’re working on adding support to common miner projects to support this change including:
Miner software needs support added before we can fully test the update pool deployments. If you want to give us a hand in getting that support completed, join us on discord at http://chat.turtlecoin.lol in #dev_general.
Alternative Pools
The pool software changes need ported to the other pools that the community service operators use on a daily basis. If you are familiar with one of the following pools, your assistance is appreciated in this regard.
- https://github.com/turtlecoin/node-stratum-pool
- https://github.com/turtlecoin/snipa-turtle-pool
- https://github.com/turtlecoin/funky-turtle-pool
Upgrades
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 soft fork as early as possible.
As with any soft fork, if and when the fork occurs, prior versions of the software will no longer be compatible with the rest of the network after soft fork completion.
What’s Next?
We’re already putting thought into the next PoW algorithm change after v5. Those discussions will be a different article, so as always, stay tuned.
This Week In TurtleCoin (Dec 3, 2018)
We are 1 week away from our 1 year birthday party! I hope you’ve got your party hat on!
Developer Community Updates
Turtlecoin Identicon Generator – Having trouble recognizing your public TRTL address? Now you can convert your boring address into something more fun. Identicons let you quickly check that you are sending to the correct TRTL address since changing just a single letter will change the image. Will you be on Green Team, Red Team, or maybe the super rare Yellow Team? Find out by entering your address at https://wallet.trtl-store.com/check.html – mosu_forge
https://wallet.trtl-store.com/check.html
RainBorgCore – This week I did some work on the RainBorgCore code to further make it usable by our community’s forks. I changed the code to allow reading a balance directly from a tip bot database if it’s hosted on the same server (so an endpoint needn’t be set up), fixed some timeout issues, reworked how the core logic works to hopefully minimize any CPU bottlenecks, and added additional configuration. On top of all that, I finally got around to doing a write-up on how she works and to hopefully provide some information on setting her up on your own server. See the readme/wiki on the GitHub repo. – Canti
https://www.github.com/turtlecoin/RainBorgCore
TurtleCoin.lol – I redesigned the node map for the homepage. It display active nodes (seen in within in last 10 minutes) on a map of the world and draws currently random connections between them. The script that grabs the nodes does provide coordinates of known peers for each peer, so actual connections can be drawn with most likely a few edits on the client side. I will leave this for someone else 🙂 – fexra
https://github.com/fexra/trtl-network-api
TurtleWallet.lol – TurtleWallet got some graphical updates this week! The online web wallet now offers a night mode theme along with an one click graph conversion for TRTL base pairs (BTC/LTC/ETH). Observant turtles should further notice small graphical tweaks and enhancements that should improve the overall user experience. – fexra
trtl-cli-py – I implemented the all pools function! Run “pools all” for detailed stats on all pools! Check it out – Sajo8
https://github.com/turtlecoin/trtl-cli-py
TwitchTurtle – TwitchTurtle has a HUGE update! TRTL.TV is a fast new service that allows viewers to donate to an integrated address with their message and name. All you gotta do if you are a streamer is check the dashboard and share the link, or add your Twitch username (capitalization matters) to TRTL.TV/uSeRnAmE. Its live now! Start streaming, start donating, start twitchturtling! – Watter
lite-blocks – Another update for another weekly roundup.. my exams are finished and I was like “let’s get this thing merged before the anniversary.. “took some valuable suggestions from iburnmycd and zpalmtree, implemented the feature as requested (99%).. hoping the testnet will be deployed soon to check whether it’s working as expected or not..
Changes in implementation: Instead of requesting a lite block with missing transactions.. we just request the transactions from the sender.. – Rashedmyt
https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin/pull/623
Community Advertisements
10,000 TRTL – Kill your past lives – SHMUP I made on Steam – buy a key for 10k TRTL! @quantumpotato in discord.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/652000/Quantum_Pilot/
Fork Watch!
Name of your TRTL fork:
NibbleClassic
Github link for your code:
https://github.com/Sudosups/NBX/releases
What is special or new about your network?:
NibbleClassic has a block time of 150 seconds which is what I like to dub as being in the goldilocks zone… at 150 seconds, this gives 24 blocks at a one hour rate, based on the supply and emmision rate, pushes 200 reward per block as a starting point, not too little a reward, not too much, just right… The goldilocks zone. We have an awesome community, we now have 2 official mining pools, a block explorer, awesome website, Paper wallet. And the best part is, under the hood were TURTLE powered! Our community is rapidly growing, bringing in new ideas and new developments, all adding to the future success of NibbleClassic
Shoutouts & Thanks
rogerrobers – Shoutout to jerme404 and dsanon and khem boi da trtl!
rock – shoutout to IBMCD for kicking ass on a daily basis. I learn a lot from you.
Lingkarcakra – TURTLE POWER INDONESIA
rock – shoutout to jerme, doge4, khem, granpa, beary, japakar, roger, mufalito for always leaving me treats under my pillow 😀
Mufalito – Thanks to roger and xaz for being here day by day in our projects, youre so nice guys, you roger are a good community promoter and you xaz you’re a smart ass guy <3 . thanks to rock for creating turtlecoin and open the gates of a nice community where i’ve meet FRENS. Special thanks to dsanon and jermy for creating the monkeytips web wallet. aWxvdmVteWZpdGxhZHM= d2VtaXNzeW91dW5jbGVjcmFwcHk=
rock – thanks to campurro for keeping his word and open sourcing his merge mining code
rock – holler at folks right now with the upper hand mining. Your days are up. I hope your fpga can mine aeon.
This Week In TurtleCoin (Nov 26, 2018) BLOCK 1 MILLION EDITION!
We have officially mined block 1 Million! We threw a hell of a party, rained oodles of TRTL to happy party goers, and had plenty of pepperoni stuffed crust to whether the storm! In this issue we tell you about the work that went in to making this week one of our most productive yet!
Block 1,000,000! – A year ago if you’d asked us if we knew that the network would ever survive to see a million blocks, there’d be times where we’d have said that you’re crazy- but since then we’ve been lucky to meet over 16,000 new friends, gained 75 developers and welcomed 45 more contributors, with a large range of service providers and early adopters. To say that we are impressed and amazed would be an understatement, and if we said we haven’t had critics along the way would be a lie- but the redeeming fact about our project is that most of them ended up loving us in the end, and that’s what matters.
I’m looking forward to another year with you guys, and I’m thrilled to share this experience with you!
Sincerely,
RockSteady
Some quick stats about TurtleCoin…
In the past year we have processed 2,473,453 transactions, mined 29,618,767,601.47 TRTL at a current steady hashrate of 32MH/s. This amounts to 2.961885% of the total supply and a difficulty of 1,020,690,513. For an average block time of 30 seconds, we add about ~1,051,200 blocks to our chain every year, making us one of the fastest growing blockchains, with a network of 2,223 nodes. That’s 28.1268% more connectivity than our nearest sibling, Monero- with TRTL having a transaction time that’s 4x faster. While the chain is fast, our team is faster- we saw 75 community developers contribute to 88 code repositories, and pushing 1,174 commits into 446 pull requests. This year we watched our core software grow past 903,000 lines of code by itself.
We’ve been busy, but we’re just getting started, and want you to join us. You don’t have to know anything but your name and maybe some karaoke skills.
We still don’t care about price. Slow and steady, a Turtle always moves forward.
Developer Community
TRTL Services – TRTL Services provides the infrastructure and the tools for developers to build on-chain apps in an easy, fun and fast way on the TRTL Network. TRTL Services does this by offering access to a role-based access control RESTful API backed by an off-chain cache of your wallet. TRTL Services comes with a variety of tools, including: a push notification system; wallet monitoring and alert service; a dashboard with oversight and statistics; and a bundle of libraries in varies languages to get started right away. – Fexra
https://medium.com/@fexra/trtl-services-has-launched-e94dc9e6033f
TurtlePay™ – Other than the overhauled block explorer, I’ve been hard at work building out modules to support Node.js/JS wallets. A lot of the ground work was already laid by other teams but there’s quite a bit of work to do here in refactoring code, documenting how it works, exposing public methods, etc. It’s quite a challenge; however, some of the most recent milestones are that I’m to the point where I can scan transactions and identify which outputs belong to a set of keys, create new key sets (addresses), decode integrated addresses, create integrated addresses, serialize transactions for the daemon, and a few small other things. I’m working on making sense of the ring signing that we currently use now to make sure that the code is well documented and makes sense for everyone. – IBurnMyCD
TurtleEDU – The first class is complete, and Fexra is about done with the skinning of the site, and we’re still ready to launch our first Beta Semester on December 9th, our 1 year birthday! For those of you’ve who’ve typed *student in the TurtleCoin Discord chat to give yourself the “Student” role, you already have access to the relevant chatrooms where you can pass on information about bugs etc so we can make everything air tight for the next class. These rooms will be active on Dec 8th.
The first class I made was to teach users how to be knowledgeable and proficient with the core suite. I aim for each class to take 15-30 minutes at most, and would like to “Gamify” it a little bit with unique badges for when you complete the class. After beta phase has completed, and we’ve fine tuned the processes with your advice, the next class will turn a knowledgeable TurtleCoin user into a junior TurtleCoin dev.
Stay tuned and please consider contributing your time as a student in the first beta semester of TurtleEDU to help us put the best foot forward at the official public launch! Thanks 🙂 – RockSteady
TurtleCoin Graphical Daemon – A while back I had the idea to throw a Qt GUI on anything that’d let me, and I started on a graphical wrapper for our daemon that would allow regular Joe Blow to run a public daemon from their house and collect some extra TRTL. So I made some headway with it and got stuck, and luckily right around the same time, hurricane LabayLabay ran through and completed everything I wanted to do and more! Recently there’s been quite a big change merged in, all thanks to LabayLabay, and we need to testers to try it out. If you have comments or suggestions, please leave an issue in the repository I’ll link below. – RockSteady
https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin-guinode-qt
TRTL-CLI-py – I’ve almost finished the command for getting stats for all the pools! I got the thing working, it just doesn’t run well from the main file 🙁 It’ll take some time to figure out, but should hopefully be ready by next week! – Sajo8
https://github.com/turtlecoin/trtl-cli-py
Faucet Space – After our awesome success with the TurtleCoin hunter faucet, Mufalo, Roger, and I have decided to create faucets for forks of TurtleCoin such as MonkeyTips, CyprusCoin etc. Behold! A central location in which all of these coins have faucet links and relevant information, all bundled into a radical space themed website! – Xaz
Fork Watch
Celestial Cash – Soft Shell implementation that is starting to look abandoned . This is more of a Call out to the TRTL community. Celestial started off well with some promising work, then Dora the Explorer went on a walk about, with no communication or succession plan. I have logged a github issue around nodes losing sync as I really want to see AMITY and CELS kick ass and be implemented in TRTL. I have been a good turtle and created some workaround Watch dogs (shell and python3) using the API for smart restarting of the daemon (workaround for the sync issue with miners) and docker files to as to become a minor contributor. Although i would like to know whats going on as you were a superstar when around Gerry although this aint no small feat takes work and teams. Give us a DM if you want to discuss things, but my best advice is to provide some comms and take the pressure of yourself if you need to there is no rush. Anyone else speak to Dora/Gerry before they went silent? Hoping Gerry Mosha is working diligently on the White paper or relaxing and figuring out a plan. just after some communication if this is still going? Time is TRTLs. Also Discussion around what to do with this if it is abandoned, I can help with minor tasks and cut teeth on some C but maybe there should be a discussion of what to do in the the worst case scenario. Aside from that , Also working on my python skills which is good fun but hardly worth reporting on. Planning on writing up the turtlecoind python pip module for pip (2) just for the hell of build it out as a learning exercise and for the compatability with RHEL systems and such. Should have some good time to work solidly on Krang over Holiday season and try out some fun things. Also calling out a risk, i just bought FarCry 5 if anyone want a game, That is all. Have a great week everyone. – Slash-atello
https://github.com/CelestialCash/
Free Community Advertising
Oiboo’s Game Emporium. Now open! A collection of games developed by you, the TRTL community. From Swanson Clicker to Flappy Turtle, there’s something for everyone! Get in contact if you want to be featured! Oiboo
@Rock asked for *short* pool ads. Come and mine in… Middle Earth. *drops mic* – funkypenguin
https://trtl.heigh-ho.funkypenguin.co.nz
Pool located right in the middle of the US. We’re small, but feisty and heavily active.
Blocks are still rollin’ in in over at the cryptonote.social TurtleCoin pool. What’s new is we’ve added a FAQ page to help you get the most out of our site, and also clearly explain the benefits of our different (and clearly superior!) payment scheme. Check it out and find out why you should be mining with us!
Shoutouts & Thanks
Oiboo, great job with the arcade 😀 It’s something we’ve always wanted – Rock
Watter- Thanks for your help with turtle twitch! Easy to set up and works flawlessly! <3 – Oiboo
Fexra – congrats on TRTL.services, love your work – Slash-atello
@iburnmycd . The man, the machine, you are a crazy awesome Turtle. Turtle Pay is going to change the game… looking forward to promoting and using it in the near future – Slash-atello
@RockSteady I’mmmmmmmm Pickkkkkkllllleeeeee Rockkkkkkkkkkkkkk. – Slash-atello
Watter, I’m impressed with all of the streamer engagement you’ve been getting and look forward to what you add next! – Rock
Fexra, I’m so proud of you and happy that I got to watch you make TRTL Services from day one. I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to set up enterprise services from watching you and IBMCD hacking away – Rock
Shout out to xaz and mufalo! – Rogerrobers
Thank you for not forking your algorithm. I need to finish paying off my asics – anon
Congrats on 1MM blocks!!!! – dsanon
Thanks to all the great turtles who helped make 1 million block party a blast! Even AFDI who was delayed, we looooove you! – Turtley McTurtleton
IBMCD You’re kicking ass over there with TurtlePay progress, and I appreciate you keeping us all in the loop on your wizardry 😀 – Rock
Shoutout to all awsome turtles…ARRRRRRRR – CaptainJac0
Zpalm I got the chance to try out Zedwallet++ and it was super smooth, nice work! – Rock
Slash, I hope you get the time to give Celestial some love! You’d be perfect to see it through. – Rock
Shoutout the FaucetHunter crew! It’s really taking off! – Rock