Lots Of Patches

It seems that I’m closing out the early, furious development phase this week. The project now has 285 commits, and 152 of those have been since I’ve been on sabbatical: 78 in the last two weeks.

So yesterday I decided to sit back for a moment and assess priorities to get to an alpha release. Then I found a bug, which lead to some more coding. But this afternoon I finally wrote my TODO list, and it looks like this: [EDIT: I’m updating this on the fly, with pointers to the appropriate commit]

Implementation:

These I think I need to do before a release:

• Have static genesis
• Save to disk / restore from disk
• Re-check prev_txhashes when we complete a shard.
• Real reward address in generating.c
• JSON RPC API (among other commmits)
• configuration file

These can wait:

• Roll in CCAN
• Remember bad txs
• Use filtering of peers.
• Timeout for slow-syncing peers.
• Timeout old unknown txs.
• Generate complaints for bad tx packets.
• Consider putting txs with unresolved refs into block.
• disable NAGLE if we can use TCP_CORK
• make pending_block->pend a dynamic array of shards.
• keep around blocks we don’t know.
• try to guess shards before we ask for them.
• move todos to end of the queue when used once
• penalize peers who make us fail too many todos
• limit simultaneous peers to ask todos
• timeout todos
• off test network.
• Implement partial knowledge.
• Generate complaints prev_txhashes being wrong

Protocol:

Before release:

• Payment to gateway.
• Fees
• Reward collection.
• peer location broadcast
• Spread out prev_txhashes

Sometime later:

• Complaint for tx in wrong shard.
• Piggyback packets
• Respect filtering of peers.
• voting mechanism to bump shard order.
• implement receipt of protocol_pkt_horizon.
• multiple gateways
• faster block times
• merge mining
• network time consensus
• Foldback of future rewards.

Testing:

I can do these any time, and should:

• sparse
• unit tests
• replay tests
• fuzz testing.

Cleanups:

Most of these are FIXMEs in the code:

• Use push/pull functions instead of marshal.
• Generate push/pull functions
• Generate log helper functions.
• Save log on abort()
• Save recent packets in log.
• ffz in ccan/bitmap
• idle hook in ccan/io

Performance:

I know these will bite eventually, but they’re not problems right now:

• Hash table for blocks
• Faster block_ancestor

Infrastructure:

These are required to have a pettycoin network:

• Write gateway bot.
  • Deploy gateway bot.
• Peer location bootstrap server.
• Permanent nodes

And these are nice to have:

• Website
• Mailing list
• White paper

I am crossing these off as I complete them…