I am currently syncing. This is really slow for a network with very few transactions, but this seems more a CPU bottleneck than a network one, as one core is used at 100% during sync.
Do you think that the POW validation could be optimized like the miner was, in order to sync much faster?
It took me a little over a day to sync which was a big improvement over the 5 days it took me on the original code. I think the speed improvement comes because the proof of work is only checked on 20% of blocks if the block is older than the latest checkpoint. The last checkpoint is now almost 4 years old in the original code. One possibility would be to only check each prime a single time instead of multiple times if the block is older than the latest checkpoint. In either case we should regularly add checkpoints.
I think the miner improvement comes from needing to check fewer primes, not from speeding up the checks themselves.
Do you plan to fully support the "3"/"bc1" addresses for Riecoin, and change the prefixes (I would suggest "3" -> "T" (2nd letter after R) and "bc1" -> "bcR" (1 became R for legacy addresses))?
The closer we are to the Bitcoin features support, the easier we will be able catch up its future updates, and there will be better compatibility for exchanges listing and other services.
I haven't taken anything out so if it is in Bitcoin it should be in the new code. The '3' and '2' come from the SCRIPT_ADDRESS that gatra set.