Been Running Too Fast!
Here in this article, we would like to provide you with a background for the reasons why there was a decision to slow down DeroGold from the current 20 seconds difficulty target (block time) to 300 seconds.
There were a number of reasons for this decision; now to go through each of these.
The first reason was the practical side of things and our project requirements. The question we asked ourselves was: “Given where we are in the life cycle of our project, do we really require to keep running at a pace of (average) 1 block each 20 seconds?” We came to a sound conclusion that we don’t need such a fast chain at the moment, and in the future there may be other options on the horizon to consider for fast transaction, no sync — no blocks — side chains (like karai).
The second reason was the cost of entry for our users. Keeping the network on pace with 20 seconds block time at the current rate of transactions meant that we would have been a 1 TB chain at the end of this year. That itself would not be much of a problem. However, we have to keep in mind that our users need to sync the chain, sync their wallets, and if they want to run their own nodes to sync their wallets with, they have to have a fast and big SSD/nvme storage. We got feedback from a lot of our users that as much as they would love to support DeroGold with nodes, this is a major roadblock for many of them.
The third reason was having exchanges and other third party services built on top of the DeroGold network in our mind. Many of our operators were unable to keep the core daemon on top of the blockchain with 20 seconds block time (partly because of the number of inputs/outputs stored in our chain that the daemon has to constantly load to memory, verify for transactions and unload from memory, rinse and repeat). The 300 seconds block time should be slow enough to be able to store the chain on an HDD.
The fourth reason is maintainability and manageability of our network. Our team, as well as our service operators and pool owners, spent a very high percentage of time in order to keep the network running. As much as we feel we improved the node’s daemon performance and stability (while working together with WRKZCoin and TurtleCoin developers), it still took time to monitor and manage our network. This was at the expense of our core team to dedicate more of their time for actual development.
The fifth reason was the point we already hinted at in the first reason. There are new approaches and new technology options on the horizon that we would like to explore in full, rather than race for the fastest block time coin in the universe. Pluton from WRKZDev made a tip bot for both Discord and Telegram that is off-chain, syncing only once in a while with the main network on the sum of the transactions. Although a long way ahead, this is where the karai development will most likely be heading — a side chain with fast transactions, as many as you like — only sending the sum of all the transactions at a close time of the side chain, or at any point when user withdraws their funds from the “side-chain wallet”. With this technology in place, it really does not matter how fast the underlying core network is.
Just a reminder for everyone, the fork comes in about 5 days from the time of writing this post (Saturday 21st March), specifically at block 2,325,000. You can download DeroGold core software for your platform of choice from our GitHub repository.
We thank each and everyone of you for supporting the DeroGold project!
