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

Development

Core development statistics since last week:

– Files modified: 133

– New insertions (+): 3,744

– New deletions (-): 12,642

Total since the release of 1.3.6cg: 107,631 insertions (+), 156,577 deletions (-).

This week didn’t really unfold as planned on the technical side – but was still a very valuable one as you will see in today’s report.

To begin with, a few major Burst mining pools were attacked this week in what seems to be a malicious effort against a particular target – namely the pools managed by the PoC Consortium. The attacks consisted of “nonce spamming” and crippled mainly the 0-100 pool for a short period of time. PoC Consortium developers spent a good amount of time fixing this issue – with great success so far (see the image below). Among many other efficiency tweaks: pools got a rate limiter, the DB backend is being reworked and the logging system has been improved to be able to track individual requests better by giving them a unique request id. The whole PoC Consortium infrastructure (CPU, memory, network, databases, etc.) is now being monitored by a “quite elaborated Zabbix setup”.

“You see here actually 4 attacks on the 0-100 pool. The first two hit us by surprise, so we added some threat analysis capable logging, which allowed us to respond to the 3rd attack better. And the 4th-barely visible “peak” encountered the countermeasures already in place”, analyzes PoC Consortium developer rico666. He concludes positively: “we are – as mad as it sounds – happy that the pool has had some burn-in tests by DDoS attacks”. Thoroughly battle-tested pools will indeed help to form a healthy and secure network.

These unplanned attacks caused some delay in the development of 2.0.0. On the positive side, it allowed the developers to get a new perspective on the next wallet version and those that will follow. First of all, you can see on GitHub that development is still going strong as we now exceed 1,000 commits ! The impressive development statistics above speak for themselves. Developers introduced a new milestones system to keep up with the future core versions. Among other benefits, it allows to rely on a progress bar instead of hard deadlines. One of the new features that 2.0.0 will introduce is UPnP: it will allow the wallet to help the user setting up his home router to run a public node if he desires to do so. In other words, the wallet can take over the hassle of configuring the port 8123 on the router. The BRS 2.0.0 wallets will not connect to 1.2X peers anymore. As they will still connect to all the 1.3Xcg wallets, these versions will form an intermediary layer. As a result, when 1.3.X nodes will start to disappear, the possibilities of 1.2X wallets talking to the network will diminish with them. 2.0.0 should also greatly improve fork handling, reinforcing once again the Burst network. “We think it’s better to release when it is ready and not when some alarm clock rings”, according to rico666. All in all, 2.0.0 comes later, but more loaded. Developers are still confident that the new version will be released in a short future.

We now have over 80% of public nodes using the 1.3.6cg wallet, undoubtedly showing the great community support for the PoC Consortium and the Dymaxion. Don’t forget do update your wallet if you have not already and follow this tutorial to learn how to run a full node.

Websites

The PoC Consortium’s Burst explorer has been greatly improved this week. Among the many changes: Four new charts for statistics regarding miners. A new asset explorer. New data in account pages: mining statistics, assets, balance progression, etc. Improvements in UX / interface.

The new tutorial documentation was also a bit delayed, but should be made available soon.

Other

A community-organized meme competition for the month of February has started! Estimated prize: 2k-3k burstcoins. Read the rules here to participate!

Conclusion

This week can be seen as a turning point in terms of development. The delay of 2.0.0 might be a little bump in the road but I am pleased to see that developers value the quality of their work more than deadlines. In the midst of the current crisis in the markets we – as crypto enthusiasts – have to direct our attention to projects that have strong fundamentals and values. I believe it is only a matter of time for Burst to get the recognition it deserves as one of the most solid, unique and powerful payment systems.

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.