Today is the first day that I start work on the Feathercoin 0.13 client, I’m very happy to be back in Feathercoin development as I’ve been away from it and crypto in general for quite a while and only just returned last summer.

To quickly update those who do not know where I’ve been I went to work for Hullcoin over two years ago under contract, the contract did not allow me to work on other projects, they hit a funding hiatus in Summer 2017 breaching my contract allowing me to return. Afterwards I contributed to the 0.9.6.2 release getting NeoScrypt to work properly for Scrypt hashing, update getwork for NeoScrypt, restore CheckProofOfWork with NeoScrypt profile as well as a few other changes. The rest of the time I’ve been working on commissioned projects to pay the bills, as well as progress UFO development, I was brought in to work on UFO in 2014 and have now adopted it as my own. UFO uses NeoScrypt and I took on commissioned work for Guncoin because it also uses NeoScrypt, it is an excellent updated version of Scrypt and it deserves to get more attention.

During the last half a year I’ve earned enough to cover myself for the next quarter of a year, at the end of that period we would hope to have a bigger user base and the kind of success that demonstrates the merits technical development. This will help us crowd fund to bring in additional skill sets and progress the tech in multiple directions at once or secure direct investment, there are good ideas out there but to see them implemented we need to be able to pay for developers time. These are concerns for later as we can now progress with the next client which will bring us up-to-date and drive development forward.

Feathercoin 0.13 is the client that I am starting on today, that version of the Bitcoin codebase has all the soft fork logic for the IsSuperMajority and Version Bits methods for soft forks. With the 0.13 client released we will be gaining the soft forks for OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY, CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY and everyone’s favourite, Segregated Witness. We certainly do not need the increased capacity that comes with SegWit but this will allow us to use other tech built on top of it like the Lightning Network which I believe is currently in the RC1 stage.

Once we have 0.13 and all soft forks enabled we can follow Bitcoin’s codebase more closely to keep us at the very front of developments, pursue other technology like Lightning Network and find some unique solutions, some suggestions have been made like adding Smart Contracts, this is an area that needs its own investigation as there are simple and complex solutions to this request.

There are many other changes between the current stable 0.9.x release and 0.13 the most notable of are the following.

Headers first synchronization

Dynamic transaction fees

Hierarchical Deterministic Key Generation

REST API interface

Improved signing security

Native Watch-only mode

Separate feathercoin-tx binary

Memory usage optimization

Stream isolation for Tor

Disable wallet transaction broadcast

Block file pruning

Signature validation using libsecp256k1

Notifications through ZMQ

NODE_BLOOM service bit

Wallet Pruning

Opt-in Replace-by-fee transactions

Direct headers announcement

Compact Block support

You can contact me on this forum via PM or by one of the following.

Email: [email protected]

Telegram: https://t.me/Bushstar

Skype: https://join.skype.com/ftH7FgL5Qw4k

BitcoinTalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=63238