I would like to introduce myself, since my boss has been so busy he didn't think of it - I am the new lead blockchain engineer/dev in the project now. My name is Loki.

I have been working on a golang version of Parallelcoin, based on Piotr Narewski's Gocoin, and I had just reached a point where the new client was sucking up blocks from the network, and I became aware there was some kind of problem with the network.

As a result of this bit of edification, I switched over for a couple of days to just messing with the ancient version as on Marcetin's repository, and I explored how the thing works between a couple of machines in my apartment (a slow old laptop and a desktop with an i5) and determined with many experiments and changes and staring at server logs, that there will be a number of pre-go-fork changes that will help encourage people to actually use this coin. I have these changes all ginned up on another repository and I've even worked up the required push but I wasn't given any access yet to the main repo so it's sitting idle on my hard drive.



1. Maximum percentage of difficulty adjustment *will be* doubled.

The reason for this is some lazy-ass bugger has taken to dropping in on the network and spewing blocks at it. The doubling of the difficulty adjustment will reduce the spewiness of their little farm of SHA256D miners a tad, well, by twice as much as it is now, per block. I considered making the adjustment more aggressive but then discovered the chain requires a block to arrive before it recomputes difficulty (more on this in a little). This will raise the cost of their slovenly grasping by about double, over the 10 or so blocks they typically grab, and maybe that will mean they go away. Well, it's not enough to make them go away, I think. The issue is simply that for hours, sometimes half a day afterwards, nobody else wins a block.

(This is partly you all's fault for not mining it with scrypt)

2. Minimum difficulty has been lowered. I dunno how many other blockchain engineers there are reading this, but scrypt is like 10-100x slower than sha256. On my i5, at minimum difficulty (bits=1e00ffff) I find a solution with 4 cores on average about every 3-7 minutes. This is way too high a minimum difficulty, considering nobody is actually mining it with scrypt.  Lowering it to this more reasonable level will mean that even just a few people running the node with -gen turned on will disrupt these long bouts of silence from the network. It's not a change that will affect sha256 mining, unless suddenly everyone turns off their miner, which is unlikely, although it seems like there's not many mining anyway.

3. We can change the chain to have 30 second blocks. Why not? Along with this tenfold reduction in block time, the block reward will also be reduced by the same factor, but you can get the same number of tokens in the same time, just that there will be more blocks involved.

I really wish I could quickly and as easily add a consensus rule that downgrades difficulty after the block window passes, but I am not really a C++ programmer and as a programmer in general, the cryptic nature of C++ is quite repulsive to me (I was hired to code in go, so, as expected). This is a change that will be first cab off the rank when I finish the gocoin fork. I simply had no idea how much of an abandoncoin, exactly, that I was dealing with, and it's amazing, and probably a testament to the loyalty of you all, that it's still not been completely delisted into nonexistence despite the glaring problems with the network.

Anyway, to give a teaser of what is planned other than such dry and dowdy things as the above (which are still pretty cool, really):

1. Masternodes - not staked! Simply, you will be able to get a share of the block reward for keeping the p2p network and make available the blockchain data to anyone who requests it. Anyone caught running a masternode that seems to be alive and serving data within a short time period will be eligible for winning the next block reward share. I am tentatively setting it at 10%, and the network will reject blocks that don't pay a masternode, or try to pay one other than the deterministically selected one (based on a hash of a specific recent block, maybe 20 back, maybe the head, I'm not sure yet).

Marcetin and I both agree that staking is an artificial incentive and market-manipulation attempt, so simply you will get paid to configure one of the new DUOD nodes to serve the chain up.

This is an interim step towards further enhancements, of course. This is a site in the architecture where I see an opportunity to start developing a SporeDB-based BFT type system. After the change is implemented, syncing to a new node will only require selecting a trusted node, and then it will slurp the whole chain directly in the form it is stored by the server (The gocoin fork squashes the data about 30%, btw, so not 128Mb but more like 90Mb right now) and the chain index, and no need to actually replay it. At your option - this is one of the reasons for doing this - you can always just sync the old fashioned way, but with this new feature, after about 150Mb of download, at most, right now, your node is up and running and answering queries. For most of you that means about 10 minutes. Replay takes about 90-120 minutes currently, and if these features make this a desirable cryptocurrency, that's indubitably going to get way worse in the next 2 years.

2. Progressive Web App GUI wallet delivered directly from your node. No more scratching around for a GUI wallet to use. Literally you will be able to point your browser at it, and tell chrome to install it as an app, and it will work also offline. The Gocoin codebase includes a fiddly CLI cold wallet as well, this will be beefed up to become a browser app also, so despite being offline, you will have the convenience of 30 years of WWW experience delivering you cold wallet functionality without forcing you to learn how to type. We likely will think about enhancing this app further to enable it to be the basis of a web wallet, that anyone can spin up in an hour and serve. I personally am wary of foreign code, so you can be sure that I will be making sure you know it's the legit, real version that you can read or pay someone to read the source of to assure you that it's not stealing your keys.

And that's just the beginning. It is Marcetin's plan also to leverage the power of this community towards growing the system to more than just a cryptocurrency. I have been working on a design for over a year now, for an extensible, modular, HARD (ie native) smart contract platform system that will include a democratically monetised forum, messaging system, distributed exchange network (including tools to help people bind in other cryptos), and the thing that is my most favourite, a gitlab type application that runs on the network that lets you get paid to code, and of course, a distributed marketplace. But we don't stop there, next stop after this is an anonymous routing system, the option to get paid for providing anonymous relay service, and eventually, the ability to launch a whole application on the network, that has the smarts to be able to run a multiplayer action game at sub 100ms latency in a massive (probably continent-bound) environment.