Previously on the debrief, Greg Meredith announced the close of a loan on RHaus estimated at roughly one million dollars. The development team commenced work with Whiteblock to deploy RNode on their environment. Kenny Rowe reported the resignation of Kate Gonsalves (CFO) and the establishment of a governance committee to define governance procedures and processes. Emphasis was made on effective communication processes. There was also a conversation about code specification in respect to IOB6.

This week, Greg Meredith offered more brain candy on channel-based security and self-sovereign identity. Ned Robinson fills in for Kelly Foster to give the technical update. The dev team is focused on stability and bug fixing. The hiring of five more developers is underway to help speed up main net delivery. The board submits conflict of interest disclosures. Greg ends the call by elaborating on the Casper consensus protocol in response to Pyrofex’s criticism about its correctness by construction.

Announcements

The Casper stand-up for Monday hasn’t been posted yet

Volunteers for the governance committee should indicate their interest in the governance channel on Discord

Individuals who received payments of any kind from the co-op (specifically Americans) must fill in their 1099 form for tax preparations

Q4 financial report due January 2019

Check out RNode v 0.8.1 release features

Weekly operations progress report

The co-op will be hiring five developers to help accelerate the speed of Mercury delivery

Visit our dev website for development tools

Try our Rholang tutorial

Timeline

Greg Meredith’s brain candy: channel based security and self-sovereign identity

Technical update: RNode v0.8.1 released, with stability work and bug fixes

Kenny Rowe’s progress report: Conflict of interest disclosure submitted

Greg Meredith speaks on Casper CBC: A response to Pyrofex’s tweet

Content in Brief

Greg Meredith gives a presentation on the notions of identity in which he addresses:

Communication acts across a range of channels

Channels can be things like phone numbers, email addresses, blockchain addresses

Expectations about those communication acts

Claims as communications made about basic observations including communications about communication acts and claims about claims

He also showed how these communication acts can be expressed in Rholang

General

RNode v0.8.1 released

See node-0.8 release plan for information about this release and links to artifacts and a docker image. We will update the website as soon as web development support is available to assist

Test net status

A public test net is not yet available. We do have a development test net running to support debugging work

New debugging tool created this week to help visualize the blockchain. This tool produces a text file that can be pasted into Graphviz to create an image like the one shown below. Planned additions include information in the blocks for the name of the validator

Platform stability is priority #1 Mercury requirements and acceptance criteria

The work continues to collect and define user stories defining the requirements for Mercury

The development team has worked this sprint to support the creation of test cases and acceptance criteria for stories that are ready

User story requirements, testing scenarios, and status will be reported in features.md. This is a work in progress. When complete, stakeholders will have a web-based dashboard showing the requirements and the status of the acceptance criteria

Work with Whiteblock

In progress. Waiting for handoff from Whiteblock to the development team so they can begin using this testing resource.

Rholang team

In addition to supporting stability work, working on other bugs and continuing work on the block store

Casper team

Fully focused on stability work

Working to build in-depth Casper knowledge on the team. Kent led a learning session with members of the team late last week. This increased the ability of others on the team to support Casper-related work

Node team

Priority is work related to platform stability. This includes work with the SRE team to improve metrics and monitoring to assist with platform debugging

Bug found in Kademlia (CORE-1546). Introduced by a change a few weeks ago that did not create failures in CI. Work in progress to both resolve the bug and expand the test coverage for Kademlia and the P2P protocols

Storage team

Priority is stability work

Review of the peek prototype is in progress

SRE team

Made significant improvements to the CI process last week by implementing Bors support for the timing of CI relative to the opening, review, approval, and request to merge PRs. This already reduced testing time, caught some issues early, and better assures PRs don’t break dev

Support work for the release of RNode v0.8.1 this week

Other work supports the stability effort

Developer website

Awaiting web development support to make updates related to the release of RNode v0.8.1 and to the REV issuance page, which no longer reflects the current timeline for the Mercury release

Derek, Ian, and Kayvan have been working on updating the web property. Derek hopes to get full access to the website within a few days

Comments/Q/A

Individuals who received payment from the co-op (specifically for Americans) should fill out their 1099 form for tax preparations

The board has submitted its conflict of interest disclosures

Draft for membership governance participation waiting for a review from the governance committee to make progress with it

Volunteers interested to be enlisted in the governance committee should indicate their interest in the governance channel on Discord

Unofficial board minutes have been published on GitHub

Comments /Q/A

Q: Will the implementation of the constraints for synchronizing be available when main net launches?

A: Yes

Comment: Double spending and liveness on Casper