Catcoin Fork Status from Etblvu1

Since at least one member of the development team has declared me off of the team for failing to agree with what amounts to the party line, I post here strictly as myself as an interested investor with some knowledge of development processes, but necessarily on behalf of the development team. I do not want to be inflammatory or controversial, and that is not my intent here. I believe Catcoin community members deserve an alternative perspective report on the fork that has been announced or is about to be announced. I will try to present this report in as unbiased a way as I can, so you can make up your own mind what it all means - and hopefully it can proceed in an orderly way.

1. Issues. We have been experiencing severe fluctuations in the rate at which new blocks have been generated - most noticeably in hours between confirmations of transactions. This has been a legitimate concern that is behind the current laudable efforts to implement a fix.

2. Team. The original developer has not been available due to circumstances beyond his control. In the meantime, several individuals have volunteered to take on various development roles, and this work has proceeded without any formal organization to coordinate the efforts - the coordination has been informal and organic.

3. Algorithm. There have been multiple algorithms proposed for implementing a solution (gravity well, loyalty credit, llacca, and simple moving average with limit). Through a particular decision-making method, a decision was reached to implement the simple moving average with 12% limit as the solution in behalf of the Catcoin community.

4. Hard fork. Through the same decision-making method, it has now been decided that a hard fork is imminently being released.

5. Secure build. To the best of my knowledge and research, it is customary in coin development for executable wallet programs to be compiled from source by two or three separate developers to verify the hashes match up before posting a link for the coin community to download it. This is a security measure to make sure a coin community is not being asked to personally trust a single developer's build environment and the developer personally, in order to download and run the program.

6. Hard Fork with Secure Build. A couple of days ago, I expressed a strong concern in the #catcoin-dev channel that verifying the hash by two developers is a good security practice yet seemed to be missing from the plan, and what is being proposed to be released would be regarded as an insecure build. At the time, I received assurance from multiple developers that of course we should release a secure build, and nobody objected to the idea at the time.

7. Hard Fork without Secure Build. It was recently explained to me that the decision to release a secure wallet for Windows and Mac OSX has been "moved to the back of the line" and a hard fork is proceeding immediately without a securely built wallet. Everyone would instead be asked to download their own source code and build the wallet for themselves. I do not quite understand why this change in plan, but frustration was expressed to me, in effect that the difficulty level situation was severe and required immediate fix, and that it could not wait for a time-consuming build verification process. One developer expressed the opinion to me that my suggested secure build procedure was too stringent a requirement - and this is probably the majority opinion among developers, although I have not taken a poll.

8. Options for Catcoin Wallet Users. Building a wallet from source in Linux for use in Linux is a fairly straight-forward process. Linux users routinely do this for most programs they use. But it is not so straight-forward for Windows and Mac OSX users. If you are a Linux user, this hard fork will be no different from any other. If you are a Windows or a Mac OSX user, with this hard fork, you will have to choose between: 1) failing to upgrade the wallet on time and potentially be on an obsolete fork or the wallet stops connecting to the network, 2) scramble to figure out how to compile a wallet program for yourself from the trusted source code, or 3) download the wallet executable from a single developer who has compiled it, and whom you must personally trust, since the compiling was not reproduced by another developer from the same source and programs verified to match up.

My Recommendation. As the release of this hard fork appears to be moving ahead, my recommendation for Linux users is to build from source and deploy as usual. For Macintosh and Windows users - either choose to trust the developer who will be compiling the executable and who will be making it available for download for your convenience, but perhaps install it on a computer separate from where you may have other coin wallets (a good security precaution to use anyway for all wallet executables of any coin type) - or find someone you know and trust personally who can build the wallet for you from source - or transfer balances to an exchange you trust (to retain the ability to spend) and not run the outdated wallet on your local computer, and later obtain a copy of an updated wallet executable you feel comfortable trusting, and transfer the balance back in.

I apologize in advance if there are any omissions or mistakes in the above list, or if I failed to be sufficiently unbiased in presenting the facts.

I want to emphasize also, that it is very dangerous for a coin to have a hard fork if the people are not unanimous in their accepting the hard fork, so the best thing to do despite any feelings you may have about the way this fork is being conducted, to accept it anyway for now, use good security steps to protect yourself (always a good idea anyway), and keep the fork unified. We can always work on improving the quality of the build process and if needed, the difficulty adjustment algorithms later. But for the health of the coin, we must remain united and agree on what fork to be on, and do everything possible to avoid the chaos of multiple forks being out there. To this end, I will try to keep my opinions to myself about this entire situation so the fork has the chance to be successful. I may post more robust commentaries once things appear to have stabilized after the fork.

Thank you,

Etblvu1