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

Weekly key data

PoCC development statistics (public repositories)

– Files modified: 34 ↓

– New insertions (+): 393 ↓

– New deletions (-): 418 ↓

Note: this solely indicates the GitHub activity on already released projects. It doesn’t reflect the work the PoCC puts into its private repositories.

Blockchain metrics

– Blockchain transaction volume: 10,011 / -27.6% ↓

– Total wallets: 156,452 / +0.3% ↑

– Burst held in Poloniex & Bittrex: 54.2% / +1.4% ↑

Network metrics

– Estimated Network Size (weekly average): 213 PB / -3.8% ↓

– Public Nodes: 433 / -6.1% ↓

Trading metrics

– High / Low: $0.005 / $0.004 USD ↓

– Trade volume / change: $698,371 / -19.3% ↓

– Market Capitalisation/ change: $10,853,274 / +46.3% ↑

Metrics by @Koru

On the dual-mining situation

Let’s start with this week’s hot topic, because I know many people have been looking forward to this Burst report for an explanatory overview. I will try my best to keep my personal opinion on the matter aside and to stick to the facts – after all that’s what readers are here for each week. I will start with a little summary of the different steps, before diving into the argument. So, what happened exactly?

On Thursday, a community member made a Reddit post asking for explanations on an ongoin dual-mining operation on the PoCC pools. In response, the PoCC published its official “PoCC pool Multi-Chain Mining Statement“. The developers announced: “in the last days we’ve successfully piloted collision-free multi-chain mining”, describing multi-chain mining as “a technology to be able to mine multiple chains without the adverse effects of collisions.” In a few words: the PoCC successfuly enabled mining multiple chains simultaneously for Burst miners. More specifically, during this test operation PoCC pools miners were effectively mining BitcoinHD (BHD) at the same time as Burst. All subsequent proceeds were announced to be reinvested in the Burst ecosystem. Everything quickly became a controversial topic and the center of attention (ex1, ex2). On Friday, PoCC developer rico666 posted a “PoCC pool operation proceedings” thread, and the community kept the discussion going until now.

Now, what do people criticize the PoCC for? From looking at the different threads on Reddit, we can see that one major complaint with the dual-mining test operation is that there was no communication prior to launching it. The fact that miners weren’t notified beforehand lead some people to qualify the situation as a “breach of trust” and a major “communication problem”. Some people have also been complaining that the PoCC was “stealing the miners’ capacity” with this test. Finally, a handful of people didn’t want their capacity to “interfere” with another coin.

I will let everyone decide for themselves, but first, because there are some counterproductive misconceptions in this debate, I would like to remind a few things: Some individuals have been claiming that the PoCC enabled dual-mining only for the personal gains of its members. The PoCC explicitely stated that “any proceeds potentially arising from this additional operation will be exclusively spent on Burst projects.” PoCC members do not get a cent from the BHD earnings. You can expect more details on proceedings distribution soon. In the same category, some people were claiming that this operation resulted in outrageous amounts of money earned. According to PoC Consortium developer rico666, “the proceedings are far below any delusional fantasies some people project into this.” I believe you can count on the PoCC to reveal the exact proceedings when there are enough numbers to do so. I would like to remind everyone that not a single miner on the PoCC pools was negatively impacted in his Burst mining operations: all Burst earnings stayed exactly the same as they should have. The mining capacity on the PoCC pools is unaffected and the Burst chain has “highest priority”. Some people have been asking the PoCC to redistribute the proceeds of BHD dual-mining to the PoCC pool miners. One argument against this is that the PoCC has been wanting to decrease its network share in the sake of decentralization for quite some time already. Sending additional payouts would obviously have the opposite effect and would result in new miners flooding the pools. Combined, the three PoCC pools currently share 45% of the network.

The PoCC initially announced that they were “working on an opt-out to be released this weekend” so that people who don’t want to support this operation but who “would still like to continue on [the PoCC] pools can simply flip a switch.” But after listening to the community, the developers finally decided to make this an opt-in option with Scavenger – which means people who want to participate in dual-mining will have to manually activate this feature. The switch is now available with the latest Scavenger release, see under “development”.

And to close the topic for this report, I would like to quote Reddit user u/mamamanete: “Please, everyone, let’s just take a break and a deep breath. […] Let’s not forget that pocc is not burstcoin. Everybody talks about decentralization and yet treats pocc as if they were a company that owns burst. They’re developers, not owners. Everybody is free to do what they want, join pools, leave pools, abandon burst completely, write their own code, trust pocc, hate pocc, but whichever way you feel about this situation, don’t kill each other. Thanks and merry Christmas!”

Development

The PoCC released a new version of its reference mining software: Scavenger 1.6.8, which includes the multi-chain switch. You can download it on GitHub.

Community member @slimknees made a “One click node option for BRS 2.2.6 for VMware OVA”. In the Reddit thread, he explains this is “a ‘one click’ local wallet/public node option for people with VMware appliances. The OVA attached is an Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine with BRS 2.2.6 setup to sync from the genesis block and run a wallet/node.” Click here for more information.

Other

The Burst Marketing Fund (BMF) has a new project to strengthen the Burst network! The BMF will start incentivizing community members to run public nodes by awarding node operators with Burstcoins. “The ‘network distribution strengthen award’ (NDS-Award) will be funded by BMF and contributed on a weekly basis.” Read more about the conditions and organization on the announcement post.

HowTo: Create Plot Files with Engraver – a Linux tutorial by sphinxicus. Check out his YouTube channel!

Conclusion

I know that we are currently in an agitated situation, but it would be much more productive if everyone could keep his cool as we are all working towards the same goals. At least, don’t let this ruin your holidays. Merry Christmas to all of you!

Thank you and see you next week.

Tom Créance (@Gadrah)

Disclaimer: The Burstcoinist does not endorse and does not take responsibility for any project mentioned in a Weekly Burst Report. All content is for informational purpose only.

Want your Burst-related project to appear in the Weekly Burst Report? Contact me and I can mention it in the next episode.

Also published on Medium.