We slammed on the brakes and slowed down. Twice.
As you may know, we decided to slow down DeroGold to 300 seconds difficulty target recently at block 2,325,000.
Why we did we decide to slow down DeroGold? We covered that topic in the following Medium post here: https://medium.com/@DeroGold/been-running-too-fast-f5590cad1ef9
During the January meet up with @Rogerrobers and @Morpheus, we agreed on the parameters for 2020 and beyond, and finally prepared the core software release at the time of the fork in March.
I wanted to squeeze out quite a few things into this fork — not only changing difficulty target, but also upgrading block version, introducing fee for fusion transactions, and removing the possibility to send fusion transactions from legacy zed wallet and from Derogold-service. We discovered a few last-minute things such as that we needed to add mined money unlock window v2, and reduce the number of block count for sync.
The night of the fork went almost smoothly. We forked, all worked. Well… Except for the upgrade to blocks major version to V6. Few nights before this I was plumbing it in, and I remember I woke up at 6 in the morning behind my desk with my head on my keyboard. I went to bed and never finished adding a few lines of code to 3 (out of 5) files that were required for the successful V6 major blocks upgrade.
Having had all the other block producers Bobbie and Pluton online, I cooked a quick hot fix and we decided to roll back about 90 blocks to pre-fork height 2,324,999 and fork again with the hot fix code.
That worked. Almost perfectly, with just a few loose threads here and there. Our pool software from DeroGold repo would not work — one of the ancient dependencies did not have block major V6 defined, so I would run into “could not parse block” error. Bummer, but it was late night / early morning for me, having had Bobbie producing blocks, I jumped into bed for a few hours (ended up being 12 hours of sleep).
Next day I fixed my pool, all seemed to be running fine. Then our long-time “tester” jumped in and started bloating our chain with transactions again, pushing the block size over 2.5MB at one point. Minor hiccups here and there, however we have survived that.
Some things to implement in the near future:
We will most likely limit the maximum block size in the first place.
Second, instead of implementing fee per byte (as did TurtleCoin and WRKZCoin do), we would love to come up with a concept pegging the fee to a block size moving average. We would split the fee into separate Tiers, with the fee to grow exponentially from one Tier to another towards the higher moving average block size.
In the meantime, why don’t you mine some DeroGold? DeroGold has now become more scarce with the slow down as we decided to keep the emission speed factor unchanged. What does that mean? The block reward is the same as it was before the slow down fork. Only now there are about 288 blocks to mine per day (compared to 4320 pre-fork).
