Dev Update

We can’t go through with this dev update without talking about the announcement from Griffith made earlier on this week. Here it is in full:

“Since the next eccoind update will be forking to a new chain, the new daemon will be version 1.0.0.0. Planned changes for the next daemon: - a bugfix for ans, its not a critical bug it just ends up being annoying - a change to sha256 (on the new chain since we will now be running 2 chains in the wallet, the old one will eventually be phased out) - staking kernel improvements - better config file generation with a random password and updated nodes - some other dev stuff most people don’t really care about (removal of a lot of boost deps, single build system, full test suite, gitian, and travis ci) Also, messaging goes into its first round of testing Monday.”

All great news!

The switch to SHA-256 will make the initial sync much faster for the ECC chain (Griffith estimated 98% faster). One of our core principles is for an awesome user experience, and this greatly improves the initial chain sync. An initial sync time of 3 days would take closer to 80 minutes with SHA. The switch to SHA will also help to make our services much faster — a SHA block computes its block hash roughly 1000x faster than scrypt. This will make for an improved user experience for the use of all of ECC’s services going forward.

Messaging testing occurring is also another great step for ECC. Testing of our second core service begins tomorrow!

So… about this fork.

Questions come up all the time about what happens to your ECC coins during a fork, what happens if you do not update, etc. Let’s address these now.

If you have your coins in your wallet:

If you have your coins in the Sapphire or Lynx wallet, you simply have to update the daemon when it comes out and you will see no interruption in using any of ECC’s services. Sending and receiving on your end will work as usual.

If you do not update the daemon, then your coins are still safe, they don’t “expire”. It just means that you won’t be able to use any of the services, including sending/receiving to and from exchanges, until you are updated to the current daemon.

If you have coins on the exchange:

First of all, we couldn’t possibly recommend more to be using Sapphire to store your ECC rather than the exchange wallet. After all, Sapphire is a pretty sweet user experience. If you prefer to store on an exchange just remember this quote from Andreas Antonopoulos,

“Your Keys, Your Bitcoin. Not Your Keys, Not Your Bitcoin.”

Same goes for ECC. Anything can happen with exchanges.

If your coins are on an exchange, then you can expect that the exchanges will put the coin in maintenance mode and you will be unable to send coins in/out of the exchange until they update their daemon. In the mean time you can still buy or sell ECC. Any coins you have on the exchange will still “work” after the fork upgrade is complete — they don’t “expire” or become useless or anything like that.

Keep in mind that the exchanges can take a while to do this task though. It took several weeks for CoinExchange to upgrade last time.