Happy Leap Day!
February Progress:
The non-interactive transaction proposal has gone through a few design iterations this month. I believe we’ve finally got a design that resolves the issues found with the first write-up, and I’ve turned that into a LIP (One-sided MW transactions. by DavidBurkett · Pull Request #13 · litecoin-project/lips · GitHub). I suspect it will still take some time before the LIP has had sufficient review to be considered safe enough to accept, but I’ll continue to keep one-sided transactions in mind as I develop.
Aside from the LIP, I’ve made good progress on the validation rules, but there’s still a lot more to do. I’ve made some modifications to the original kernel design to support the ability to soft-fork in new features in the future. I’ve also started to build out the merkle mountain ranges (MMRs), which are a data structure we use to commit to kernels & outputs. Once the MMR logic is finished, I should be able to get back to the block validation logic. I didn’t get to work on the Node API like I had hoped, but that’s something I also expect to get to next month.
I’ve so far been very hesitant to give exact dates on when things should be finished, because writing blockchain software is difficult, time-consuming, and unpredictable at times. I didn’t want artificial deadlines to force us to rush through parts of the code and introduce defects or security vulnerabilities. Having said that, I think it’s finally time to commit to the first major event…
End of Summer: MW Testnet Launch - This will include all block & tx validation rules, basic p2p messaging, transaction pool, syncing, and the ability to mine blocks. This will NOT include a usable GUI wallet for casual users to test it out. Transactions will likely need to be created manually at first, or via a cli or automated tool.