This is good time
AEON new roadmap
The main focus of the roadmap going forward is to rebase against the current Monero. Monero has had many improvements LMDB storage of the blockchain, added features including view-only wallets, message signing, and many others. Monero adds the ability to prove payments using tx keys, which is necessary to trade on decentralized exchanges such as bitsquare.io.
The other major area of work in Monero is the upcoming GUI wallet, which is a brand new design. While AEON already has a GUI wallet using the old Neozaru open source, that upstream code is no longer maintained. Instead the Monero GUI will be ported to AEON.
Of great importance, Monero is in the process of adding RingCT, which hides the amounts of payments and improves overall privacy and fungibility significantly, with little to no additional transaction size (since RingCT replaces denominations). Some of the items from the existing AEON roadmap, such as the ability to do signature trimming and faster syncing of non-fully-validating nodes, are being incorporated in Monero's RingCT implementation, so those will be brought here as well. Finally, there are a number of other improvements such as better support for full-transparency (including spending) on view key wallets and proof-of-reserves. AEON will gain all of these features for free while it migrates to a newer, better maintained code base.
What will be retained in AEON? First of all, our lightweight and mobile-friendly PoW which allows verifying the blockchain around 4x faster or more. Second we will retain the ability to do lightweight non-anonymous payments without compromising privacy of other users (Monero addressed the privacy issues by completely banning these). Finally the pruning branch will be adopted for Monero's LMDB storage. The independent branding, development, and community will allow AEON to continue to thrive as a separate platform while sharing many of the technical underpinnings from Monero and Cryptonote.
I'll take TechorMarketing's question above as a suggestion and include the lightweight encrypted message proposal as part of the roadmap as well, and I am open to other suggestions on similar experimental enhancements.
Overall this gives us something closer to a Litecoin model (in terms of sharing more code with the upstream project while maintaining an indepednent identity and leadership, along with some new and experimental features), which will continue to be sustainable going forward despite limited development resources. Thus everyone can have a high degree of confidence that AEON will continue to be maintained and remain usable.
This roadmap is more than I could have possibly hoped for. Thank you smooth!
It is time for the community to start stepping up. Make an Aeon website if you have the skills to do so, get active on Stack Exchange, accept Aeon payments if you own a business and create new Aeon related services. Smooth is a wonderful developer and the community should show its appreciation by doing whatever it can to help.
