The Weekly Burst Report is a report published every Sunday meant to centralize and outline the important Burst information of the week.

Today’s edition is going to be bit special. Since we only have a few hours remaining before 2018, we will celebrate the new year with a summary of the important events that marked Burst in the last 365 days. Enjoy!

2017 Summary

The first half of 2017 has been unfortunately marked by drama. Because of differences within Burst-Team (at the time the main organization developing and managing the Burst softwares and resources), several members founded Burstnation at the beginning of 2017. After months of cleavage and extreme tension between the two intra-communities, against a background of asset scams and personal attacks.

After a few months, the situation escalated to a point where a few developers and key community members decided to retire from the Burst community. In addition to that, on July 22nd of 2017 an attacker spammed the Burst network with messages, causing wallets to crash and splitting the network into multiple forks. The network remained unstable for several days.

In the midst of that crisis appeared the PoC Consortium – a new organization of developers coming to “lead Burst to its rightful place amongst the top cryptocurrencies”. Starting from August 2017, they quickly started to fix problems that had been crippling Burst for months such as wallet and infrastructure instability. Release after release, faith came slowly back into Burst. If you have not already, you can read the Weekly Burst Reports 1-16 to get a detailed description on how websites, softwares, and more generally Burst as a whole has been completely overhauled.

On wednesday was released The Burst Dymaxion white paper, describing the implementation of a new technology that will transform Burst for the better, detailed below.

BurstNation officials officialy announced yesterday their retirement from the Burst community.

Looking at the situation from a financial point of view: we started the year 2017 with a market capitalization close to $900,000. We are currently hovering around $100,000,000, which is more than a 100x increase.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the events that happened this week. Brace yourselves, it is pretty intense.

Development

Core development statistics since last week:

– Files modified: 133

– New insertions (+): 2,674

– New deletions (-): 3,740

Total since the release of 1.3.6cg: 88,534 insertions (+), 138,367 deletions (-).

Finally! The Dymaxion was revealed on Wednesday. The Burst Dymaxion is a white paper describing a tangle-based lightning network – it implements layers to the Burst network in the form of payment channels. Each of these payment channels is opened in the form of standalone colored tangles, on top of the Burst blockchain that runs on the Proof-of-Capacity protocol. With the Dymaxion, Burst becomes a truly global, scalable, energy efficient and anonymous transaction system. For those who want to know more about the Dymaxion without the technicalities of the white paper, I published a Burstcoinist article titled The Dymaxion Explained in Layman’s Terms. Another article is planned for next week, explaining the CIPs and the 2018 roadmap. Some further questions have been answered in a Q&A reddit megathread. Implementation of the CIPs described in the white paper will start at the beginning of 2018. The PoC Consortium would like to stress the fact that the main bottleneck that may slow the implementation is the community, if wallets are not updated to the latest 1.3.6cg. Everybody using the AIO should update to Qbundle, and everybody still on 1.2.9 should update to 1.3.6cg. Download the latest version here.

The PoC Consortium posted an interesting screenshot on twitter:

As you can see, the heavy code refactoring that is going on since the launch of 1.3.6cg also removed a hundred bugs and eighty vulnerabilities from the code, and developers are not even done yet. The BRS is going to be even more stable than now, and written in top-quality code.

The PoC Consortium posted a sneak peek of a new pool software that is going to be released in the very short future, probably next week. According to PoCC developer rico666, the pool will have a new interface and is going to be able to scale to tens of thousands of miners without performance losses.

Websites

www.burst-coin.org has been updated to include information related to The Burst Dymaxion white paper. The roadmap has been updated. A dedicated Dymaxion page has been set up. In addition to that, the how to & tutorials section is going to be renovated soon with better organized and up-to-date tutorials for all operating systems.

The Burstcoinist is going to be migrated to new servers to handle the load of new visitors.

Burst has been listed on the exchange coinroom.com and can be directly traded for fiat there: USD, EUR, PLN, GBP, NOK, CHF, CZK, DKK.

Burst has been added to the Cheddur application, “your personal guide to digital currency.”

OTHER

Reddit user BurstJack has been working on Burst’s Automated Transactions for some time now to facilitate and spread the use of smart contracts in the Burst ecosystem. You can follow his progress on his website (http://atburst.synergize.co/content.php) – don’t hesitate to contact him if you would like to participate.

@Bombtrack created an impressive animation explaining Burst:

Don’t forget to comment and share the video! Contact Bombtrack if you would like to help with the translation of the subtitles.

Some members of the community would like to contribute from a marketing standpoint. Join them on the #marketing channel of the Burst Discord and help spread the word!

BurstNation officials announced yesterday their retirement from the Burst community. The PoC Consortium addressed the situation in a Reddit open letter. BurstNation is going to be rebranded and will focus on many different cryptocurrencies.

The Burst network resisted effortlessly to a little spam attack that filled all the blocks from 441640 to 441658. What would have crippled the network months ago went unnoticed this week – the attacker just gave away 4500 burstcoins to the miners. Thank you mister attacker!

CONCLUSION

What a week. These last 7 days were by far the most intense period of the year for Burst and for the community. The release of The Burst Dymaxion white paper is setting very high goals for the Burst developers – yet with the support of the community they should be achieved relatively quickly. I encourage all long standing members of the Burst community to accompany the flow of newcomers pouring into Burst – let’s build a strong, united community to support this amazing project in 2018. I will close this report with a few words from the PoC Consortium developers: “We leave 2017 with BURST healed, renewed, charged. 2018 will certainly be the most thrilling year for this marvelous currency – expect some big leaps. We are prepared and determined.”

Happy new year – enjoy your HODLidays!

Thank you and see you next week,

Tom Créance (@Gadrah)

If I forgot something in that report, let me know and I will make sure to mention it next week.

Also published on Medium.