Actually, Graham has not "sadly gone" nor have I been away so I'm not even "back". The basic truth is that I'm pushing 70 and the relative inactivity of long hours spent at the keyboard is becoming increasingly prejudicial to my overall heath, so for my own sake I'm obliged to reduce my level of engagement. This entails aggressively managing others' expectations and not allowing my schedule to be held hostage to random public misperceptions. Hence, I only report on work that has been completed ... read on ...

Gapcoin now has a community-led Github repository of its own: https://github.com/gapcoin-project which is now host to all the associated Gapcoin repos (i.e. Gapcoin, Gapminer and the submodules Gapcoin-PoWCore, Evolution and C-Utils). I strongly recommend that you sign up for a (free) Github account, at least so you can be automatically informed by email of changes to the Gapcoin project resources even if you don't wish to contribute to the project directly (e.g. by helping to maintain the project web site, see below).

On behalf of the project, I have taken advantage of Github's free static website maintenance and hosting facility (GitHub Pages) to create a community-led web site for the project - https://gapcoin-project.github.io/. The reason it's "community-led" is that the source code for the web site is maintained in a dedicated Github repository - https://github.com/gapcoin-project/gapcoin-project.github.io and can be maintained/extended/edited by any member of the project that wishes to do so. The advantage of a community-led and community-maintained approach is that the resources are no longer the responsibility of just one person but the onus is shared across the group.

In order to get things moving, I've used the Opentheme Jekyll site template (the same one I used for the mersenne forum's prime gap search group) to provide structure and functionality, it's now a matter of re-branding and adapting the example content provided. This approach has the advantage that the site can be hosted locally, edited/changed as convenient. The final changes can be committed and pushed back to the Github repos and they will then be automatically published to the project web site. It's a popular approach and all aspects are well-documented (search for "Github pages" and also "Jekyll").

I have upgraded the Gapcoin codebase to Core 0.9.4 (see the branch v0.9.4-gap) (use git clone -b v0.9.4-gap https://github.com/gapcoin-project/gapcoin.git) and have added some functionality.

The client now has a built-in "block explorer" (aka a GUI presentation of data otherwise accessible via the JSON-RPC API or console)

Block display:



Transaction display:



The client now offers a dialog box showing a list of Gapcoin-held prime gap records along with the information recorded in the block data - with the aim of casting a little more illumination on mining settings:



I have edited the contents of the "About Gapcoin Core" dialog box to have two tabs, one showing the standard copyright credits (and some other stuff) and a second tab commemorating/crediting John Frey:



I've added a "Mining" tab with fields for setting values for shift, sieve size and number of primes in the sieve:



and a "Notary" tab, easing Gapcoin's (inherited-from-Bitcoin) utility to act as a blockchain-preserved notary.



I've also committed a "dumpbootstrap" command to the JSON RPC API command set - it dumps a file of linearized blocks (bootstrap.dat) which can be read back in (takes a couple of days, even on my fast-ish laptop).

I have updated the pnSeeds entries (the IP addresses first consulted by a syncing-from-zero client) so no need to hand around lists of addnode IPs, there's also a fresh working testnet and a testnet pnSeed, so clients started with -testnet should sync up very quickly.

I have added a download-and-build script for BerkeleyDB 4.8 for convenience when compiling a Gapcoin client with full wallet portability.

With respect to integrating GapCoin-PoWCore into the code, it is also a submodule for GapMiner, so rather than have to maintain two copies of the same code, I simply updated the submodule references for both Gapcoin and GapMiner.

I also recommend signing up to the created Discord server, that's where you will discover that ocminer is also working on a pool for Gapcoin.

Cheers

Graham