December 17, 2014

This week revolved around new client versions and discussions related to improving the upgrade process. In this regard, we have some good news to share.

From the Team

After gaining feedback from the community and discussing the matter internally, we decided to improve our release process by providing a release document with every new client version. Besides notifying the community on new client versions through various channels, and sending SMS and email notifications to our members, we will share the specifics of each release so everyone understands the implications involved. Some specifics of the release document will include:

is the upgrade required or not required

upgrade instructions (such as if it requires a reindexing or non-standard bitcoind build)

if the upgrade is not required, the document will provide a list of affected commands

In case you have some other suggestions as to what should be included in the release document, let us know on the Counterparty Skype channel.

In other news from the team, this week we held the first official meeting of the Counterparty Foundation Board of Directors with the purpose of agreeing on the Foundation’s monthly budget and electing the members of the executive committee. Notes from the meeting can be found in the foundation’s post.

From the Web

This week we’d like to share three articles from the web (not directly related to Counterparty):

What are Smart Contracts? by Florian Glatz explaining the nature of smart contracts,

Setting the record straight on Proof-of-Publication by Peter Todd providing definitions of proof-of-publication, describing uses cases for it and dispelling some of the common myths about it.

Medici, The Blockchain Stock Exchange by Investopedia – article about Counterparty, Overstock and the new Medici project.

As explained in the Development Update post, we have released a mandatory upgrade of counterpartyd to v9.49.0. More on how to upgrade to v9.49.0 can be found in our forum thread: counterpartyd hotfix (Dec 11, 2014) + mandatory upgrade to v9.49.0 by block 334000. Moving forward, new client upgrades will include a release document making it easier for everyone to get their systems up-to-date.

Another important development update is the multisig and free asset names implementation in Counterwallet. As of block 333500 Counterwallet users are able to create multisignature addresses and free numeric assets.

That covers our development updates for this week. If you have any questions regarding recent or upcoming changes you can contact us via our support channel, forum or github.

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