Hello again, followers of MintCoin!
As explained in the last update, I was away for a while, and did not have much time for Mintcoin. So this will be a light update, but hopefully still interesting.
In spite of there being not much development activity, there has been a lot of other activity in the MintCoin world.
One thing that everybody reading this will surely know is that the crypto currency market has been crashing pretty hard. The current market cap as reported by CoinMarketCap is just over 250 billion US dollars, which is about one third of the heady heights of early January 2018. MintCoin itself has also gone down in value quite a bit, also about one third of its recent value versus Bitcoin. Rumors abound about pump and dump schemes, whales manipulating the prices, and so on. We all hope that the underlying utility of crypto currencies and MintCoin in particular will turn this around.
Another non-development activity is nearly non-stop drama that has occurred in the MintCoinOfficial Telegram group. Various individuals and groups have spent a lot of time and energy being upset with each other. It certainly did not feel very minty for several weeks. Things have been quieter for the last few days, so hopefully we have passed through the storm of community unrest... and are not just in the eye of the hurricane.
That's more than enough doom and gloom for one update though. Lets talk about the recent technical developments!
We've only had two changes merged since the last update:
-
ARM build support has been merged into the main repository
While you need an ARM machine with 2 GB or more of RAM to run the wallet right now, it is possible and "officially" supported now, right out of the main source. -
Error fix from static code analysis
I rancppcheckagainst the MintCoin wallet source. This is a type of program that looks at source code and searches for common errors. It only found one possibly serious error, which has been fixed. A lot of warnings were found, which should be fixed, but these are less critical and have a lower priority.
Our ever-productive Enlil has been working on a way to access your MintCoin wallet from a mobile device, and has built a Telegram bot that you can link up to your wallet. We are excited to see this kind of innovation, and look forward to seeing where it goes in the future.
Source code, and an explaination of how it works, is available here:
https://github.com/nexus166/walletbotd
The official GitHub repository remains:
https://github.com/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet
We added one new issue:
- Investigate reproducible builds of the wallet
Something we will want to look at in the future is a way that we can make sure that the code that you run can be verified to be correct. This will prevent unscrupulous individuals from trying to get you to run a trojan program which may steal your precious MintCoins or worse!
Our main goals now are still:
- A 64-bit Windows wallet build
- A macOS wallet build
We have actually made progress on the 64-bit Windows wallet, now being able to easily build both a 32-bit and 64-bit command-line Windows wallet from Linux. The graphical Qt wallet is still not quite there, but should not be too much longer before it is ready for testing.
On the macOS side, Enlil has found a way to run a macOS virtual machine without requiring an Apple computer. With that in place, we should be able to get a macOS wallet built, hopefully over the weekend but if not then surely early next week.
Our list of things that would be nice remains:
- Speeding up the initial sync
- Packages for popular distributions (like Debian and Fedora packages)
And our list of things that should be done someday also remains:
- Wallet code automated testing
- Reducing the memory footprint
Please contact us if you want to help, or just fork the code on GitHub and start hacking.
If you live in a place that celebrates Easter, then have a great Easter weekend! If you don't then have a great weekend anyway. It may be the only time you can safely eat mint-colored eggs, so savor the special time of year.
Mint in peace and love,
Shane Kerr
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
