Just a brief update, since I think it is good to give people an idea of progress and always a good plan to bump with a meaningful update on these threads to keep them visible.

I have almost finished the update to the parallel-prime difficulty regime update. The most persistent bug I have dealt with so far has been related to the block template generator, which of course in the much maligned `btcd` from which we are building, has not been used by many of the ... ahem... bitcoin core users - and for good reason since it's slow as molasses at synchronising.

Well, the block clearance rate during sync now averages around 800tx/s peaking at 2000tx/s which I think is related to the network limit, I am pretty sure this is well above what BTCD achieves and is not far from par with bitcoin core. I already fixed this issue, it was mainly caused by c++ programmers (my surmise) ignorant of the light weight and utility of Go's inbuilt concurrency systems, and far too expansive delineation of critical sections. At least one minor bug has been reduced that I am sure was caused by synchronisation with the production of block templates for miners.

We here at Plan 9 Crypto (ie me and @marcetin) have been contending with various kinds of parasites due to my unfortunate exile from serbia and exile from even a computer I could code on, last I saw him he was in a foetal position with a really nasty 39`C fever and I hope he comes out of it soon. I had the fever also a couple of days before and this morning I woke relatively feeling better. No, it's not coronavirus. Plain old Rhinovirus, aka common cold. What he has may be something more, some sort of stomach or throat or sinus bacterial infection causing the fever, but I am confident he will recover soon and I will be able to update.

He has now constructed most of an RPC console that will be used in the final GUI and we are finally adopting the use of github's issues and project management tools, which you can see here: https://github.com/p9c/pod/projects/1

Things are pretty intense for us at the moment. We have nearly no funds and the devil's whip has never felt closer at our backs in our lives. So rest assured, we are aiming to hit a target of beta release by the end of february, we are gonna do our derndest to reach it.

We will be updating more regularly now that the final destination is looming. No, not that Final Destination, dammit!