It’s that time of the year again. We cooked for you a new DeroGold release, which we numbered v0.6.0.
Let’s have a quick look what’s new in the release and what actions you need to take before we hit block 2,420,000 in about 10 days from now (at the time of writing this post that is).
Algo change
First, let’s start with the most important news. Our algo which we use for the Proof of Work — the way miners mine our blocks — changes to Cryptonight UPX, also referred to as cn-upx/2. Why?
We have been on our original algo Cryptonight-turtle (also referred to as cryptonight-pico) since our early blocks when we started our blockchain in December 2018. While we loved this algo for its good performance in small devices (such as ARM SBCs — single board computers, the likes of Orange Pi, Raspberry Pi …),
as well as solid performance with GPUs, we thought it was time to switch to a more power efficient algo.
As you know, the core idea behind our project is sustainability and various environmental aspects. That’s why we wanted to adopt even better algo for our project — one that would produce less heat, consume less energy, and would be even more efficient on small devices known as ARM SBCs or phones.
We had a look around and assessed various options. We knew that our friends at WRKZCoin adapted cn-upx/2 quite a while, and we saw good feedback from the WRKZCoin miners on that algo.
The efficiency and effectivity of the cn-upx/2 algo, as well as the potential for merged mining with WRKZCoin and UPX was too tempting to miss. And voila, we fork to cn-upx/2 algo as of block 2,420,000.
What does this mean for you?
If you are a miner, first, check your miner if it supports cn-upx/2 for your set-up. Ask your pool operator if they are ready for the fork and produce blocks after we hit 2,420,000.
If you are a node operator, make sure you upgrade your core suite (daemon etc.) to run your node & services to release v0.6.0. If you don’t upgrade, your node will not sync past the 2,420,000 block.
If you keep your wallet synced using a remote node, assumed that your remote node operator upgrades in time, you should be all set and no need for you to take any action.
Significant space requirements reduction for node operators
We promised this for some time. There was a time last year when we experimentally ran our code with “no-bin files” commit. However, back then it did not turn out well.
Thanks to Pluton of WRKZCoin team, he came up with export/import feature for easy-to-use blockchain backup, and as a result it was safe to implement the no-bin files in an improved form yet again.
What does this mean for you if you are a node operator? Once you upgrade to the core suite release v0.6.0, you can safely delete blocks.bin and blockindexes.bin files from your DeroGold data directory. At the time of writing this article, it will save you over 100+ GB of your storage space.
Backup and restore your node with export and import blockchain feature
Last year, Zpalm of the TurtleCoin Developers started to work on a blockchain export and import feature. Pluton of the WRKZCoin team took it a few levels further and made it useful for production.
And now this feature comes to DeroGold as well, for your easy-to-use backup and restore of your nodes! Keep in mind, we are a large chain, using this feature will take up significant space on your storage, as well as take considerable amount of time to do full backups and restores.
Single DeroGoldd file for both RocksDB and LevelDB
In previous releases, you may have noticed you had to use a separate core suite build for the daemon/node to use RocksDB and LevelDB. This is no more!
As of core suite release v0.6.0, we have a command-line parameter to use LevelDB ( — db-enable-level-db). No parameter defaults to use RocksDB.
So, you may ask, which one is better, RocksDB or LevelDB. The best answer we can give you is “it depends”. Why?
It really depends on your goals. RocksDB offers a better bottom-most compression mechanism. You will — at the time of writing — be able to squeeze the size of the DeroGold blockchain to well below 400 GB (estimate with no-bin files).
The LevelDB is not as good with the compression. Or better said, we did not make it that good (yet). What LevelDB offers you is better uptime and daemon stability. For this you have to accept a slightly bigger space requirement. At the time of writing, our LevelDB nodes use about 460 GB of space.No more zedwallet-beta, degwallet!
No more zedwallet-beta, degwallet!
Just a slight name-change, we know. And probably a few references to zedwallet will need to be changed in the wallet interactive menus & texts as well (good first-time opportunity for you to contribute to DeroGold for all you aspiring developers who read this article!)
We ditched the legacy zedwallet completely and rebranded the zedwallet-beta to degwallet. Your .wallet file should upgrade automatically when you first time open your .wallet in degwallet.
A few additional fixes here and there
For those of you who ran a pre-v0.6.0 code, you may have noticed our next estimated fork-date calculation in node’s ‘status’ command was wrong. We hoped some of you aspiring developers would open an issue for it and got your hands dirty to submit a PR. We waited too long. So that’s why we fixed it ourselves! :-)
How about TX PoW algo, any changes there?
In plain words. No. The Proof of Work on you to submit a transaction to the mempool from your wallet stays the same — we continue to use the Cryptonight-Turtle for transactions PoW. Unlike mining, in order to keep our network fair use and stability, we will continue to use a more resource-intensive algo at a higher level of difficulty to submit transactions.
Please don’t forget to upgrade to v0.6.0 now!
