Ever wonder when your node is syncing why it jumps back and forth between 2 days and 2 months behind? Yeah, we’ve had enough of that too.

It’s Time We Clean Up the Town!

We take network upgrades very seriously here at TurtleCoin. We want the network to be as safe, easy, and secure as possible for our Turtle brethren. We do our best to test all changes and make sure that our fellow Turtle are given plenty of time to upgrade their software before a change takes effect. Unfortunately… not everyone upgrades when necessary.

Running Legacy Software

We attempt to provide everyone ample notice before upgrades occur, what the upgrades will do, and how they benefit the network. However, not every Turtle visits the TurtleCoin discord, checks the GitHub repo, or watches the various forms of social media we have.

There are uncountable nodes running around on the network playing by antiquated network rules disrupting the network and causing utter chaos at times. When Turtles run old software it causes a variety of issues, including but not limited to the following:

Slower syncronization as the out of date nodes attempt to push blocks that don’t match the current network rules Your node has to waste time checking their block and finding out it doesn’t fit the mold before the connection is dropped. Then your node has to find a new peer to hopefully get the correct block(s) from

The daemon must store old alternative chains in memory in the event that they one day resolve (highly unlikely) This results in the blockchain wasting space on your system

Your log is filled with messages about unexpected hashes, failed hashes, etc.

Many other issues we don’t know about yet

The Solution

TurtleCoin v0.8.3 implements a new version checking mechanism that starts the process of checking the version of peer software when trying to exchange blockchain data. When we connect to a peer, or a peer connects to us, the version of the peer is compared against a minimum version that is supported. If the peer is not at or above that minimum version, the connection is dropped. This helps us to ensure seamless network upgrades in the future that aren’t cluttered by those that do not keep their software updated.

Note: Version 0.8.3 does not perform this purge of old nodes, it merely sets the stage for the event in future release(s).

We’ve also added additional log messages that warn you when you may be out of date (as you’re seeing nodes with higher versions than the one you’re running). If you see such a message, as always head over to http://latest.turtlecoin.lol to make sure you have the latest version of the software.

Future Purges

The development team aims to utilize this feature for soft forks that are the result of a mining algorithm change, difficulty algorithm change, or any other event that requires that the project to implement a soft fork.

Such a strategy helps us maintain the security of the network by alterting our fellow Turtles of upgrades and keeping legacy nodes off the network.

Thanks, No, Seriously, Thanks

We appreciate everyone that runs a node on the network, public, private, or some mix in between. It helps the stability of the network and shows everyone that we are here to stay. However, if you are one of the people running an ancient copy of TurtleCoin, please upgrade to v0.8.3 and all future releases within the posted ugprade window in the version release notes. You’ll help the community out considerably.

Otherwise,