As you may know, today marks one year to date since we started DeroGold.
In boring numbers, we just passed block 1,900,000 the day before DeroGold’s first birthday. We clocked a hefty 21.3 million (yes!) transactions on the network, and our blockchain grew to an unbelievable 250GB.
Most of the year we focused on keeping DeroGold going, against all odds. We just decided not to give up no matter what. No matter what, you may ask what happened in the first year of DeroGold?
One year ago to date, we started fast and furious. In the first few months, we were at 10 seconds block time and a different emission curve. Our early adopters threw at us a fairly significant hash rate, at points exceeding 4MH/s on our algorithm.
The limitation in both the code and infrastructure, as well as our inexperience of how to run a very fast block coin required us to slow down. We forked to 20 second block time and emission factor 24 at block 700,000.
Shortly after, we published our whitepaper and … the community disappeared to do other projects, ideas split into different directions, disagreements came and … our coin was hit by some transactions spamming attacks.
So much so that it made some dents on our coin. Split chain, far too many transactions in the pool, very fat blocks as a result. But the core team and our supporters around DeroGold grew closer together.
Boy, we have had some fun! I, LeoCuvee, remember a few nights on our Discord with Sniperviperman, CapEtn, Bobbie The Coindumper, SolFly literally holding the chain together with our bare hands to keep it going. We had what the spammer did not have — the will to keep the coin and its original blockchain going. We have certainly succeeded at this.
A few things have happened though. Together with our founder Rogerrobers, we realized as a project who we want to be. A cryptocurrency project with a cause. An environmental cause to be precise. In the long-term, we will create plans, document and even build artificial islands in our efforts to promote seasteading. We will develop a gamified plastics & glass recycling reward scheme to help clean up the environment we live in — our beaches, towns, countryside and so on.
With that in mind, we may very well have to polish up some of our initial plans. We certainly have to continue to work on the technical side of our coin in addition to this. What are our plans for the second year of our existence then?
First and foremost, we plan a monthly release cycle for DeroGold in 2020. At the time of writing this summary, we are cooking up a January DeroGold release v0.3.2. It will be a mandatory upgrade before block 1,980,000 which brings about significant improvements to how we handle transactions, and which transactions we allow to make it to a block, as well as enforce ration between inputs and outputs that transactions are made up of.
The February release will bring about the long-awaited RPC threaded rewrite (thanks to @zpalmtree) that will allow us to increase performance of the nodes & network overall significantly.
We may include the Fee per Byte (developed by @zpalmtree) into our February release as well or may postpone it till March.
Last but not least, still coming in December 2019, a new GUI wallet.
Other plans for the rest of 2020 include:
- At least 5 strong nodes running blockchain cache service layer
- First applications utilizing blockchain cache: Android wallet, BlockExplorer, API for Payment Gateway plugins
- Recycling scheme DeroGold4Plastic waste app that will run on top of blockchain cache and will combine QR code vouchers, simple online terminals at waste collection centers
- Core daemon optimizations (if not a full rewrite) of the P2P part of our code
- Improve availability of the core services to a point we can only focus on allowing our community to build 3rd party services on top of the core suite
- Introduce a single GUI wallet for DeroGold, TurtleCoin and WRKZCoin — the two projects that are close to us (both DeroGold and WRKZCoin forked from TurtleCoin).
If all goes well, our network is strong and stable, and we achieve significant part of the above set goals, we may fork back to 10 seconds block time again at some point in 2020 or 2021. We don’t want to rush this decision however.
With us hitting the plans outlined above, we expect to become fairly visible among other crypto projects. This may bring listing to a second CoinMarketCap exchange (the first CMC exchange we are listed on is Finexbox).
Although we are not actively pushing for another exchange listing at this at the point where we are with our project, such listing and the resulting exposure, visibility and scrutiny of our project will happen sooner or later.
Last but not least, we want to grow our footprint in terms of reach, visibility and community. We improved a lot with our Discord channel. We may consider some other forms of communication, such as our own Social Media platform. We will also be more active on Medium, Twitter and via other channels.
We will start new alliances with groups and non-profits focused on environmental causes. We are aware that our cause joined up with crypto is not for everyone. However, both Rogerrobers and I believe in our path, and we will make it work.
Now that our crowdfunder at Indiegogo https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/floating-recyclable-islands-can-save-the-world#/ has concluded, we are even more committed to our goal despite the lack of reaching funding. The DeroGold team spent upwards of 500 dollars in our efforts to promote DeroGold’s crowdfunder and with all of that money spent we only received one contribution. This contribution was from an esteemed member from our discord community who probably would have contributed whether or not we spent all that money. We also spent 1000s of hours preparing this crowdfunder, spanning nearly 6 months in total and despite all our best research and promotion we did not get any buzz at all.
This is okay because we know our idea is unconventional and unfamiliar for many. Despite this setback, DeroGold will continue to keep chugging along towards its mission. But right now, we are writing this as a retrospect of the past few months and we want to dissect things for the readers of our Medium. A lot of people were very enthusiastic about the crowdfunder, and said that they would contribute or wanted to contribute but never did. We have to accept that this is totally fine, that no one had to contribute. We in no way shape or form expected everyone to give us their money and we really did this to ideally reach people who have the type of expendable money lying around to be able to throw some money at us without it affecting them. We know that we are basically an unproven start up essentially but we don’t necessarily need to use Indiegogo as the end all be all measuring stick. Thus, we shall consider this endeavor more of a diving board that we launch off and up from. Now we have our name, DeroGold, out there for the world to see. A name that shows us as standing up to represent the cause that we feel is just and the right thing to do.
The situation that we have now is that while in general people among the DeroGold community and elsewhere were very enthusiastic, some people were downright incredulous. For example, we made a post on r/seasteading about our project (https://www.reddit.com/r/seasteading/comments/dodeoy/crowdfunding_a_new_type_of_seastead/). A lot of the responses on reddit were of people baffled by how we said we could build an island for only a 50k budget. One person who commented by the name of “Nostagar” said “Wide Eyed Idealists is what you come off as.” Other people like this poster named “Penis-Envys” can’t comprehend how cheap our methods will be. That user explicitly said “50k for a seastead is way too unrealistic.” This response is obviously disregarding that our costs for materials would be as near 0 as possible because we plan to work mostly with refuse. In the end, we tried to make our 50k budget look as reasonable as we could but nonetheless some were baffled. For example, one poster by the name of “rustyrocky” went so far as to say “ Filming will easily hit $100,000 alone.” That is not all they said though, “rustyrocky” later went on to say “If David can pitch me with a real proposal With hard numbers and analysis of the structure in this environment either me or friends or nation state will fund it assuming the numbers check out.” The status of that funding is yet to be determined. If we here at DeroGold didn’t think the material ferrock was up to the task we set out for, we would not have gone through all the trouble with organizing and enacting this crowdfunder. It is through our diligent research that we settled on this material and partnered up with Dr. Stone to make this all possible.
Even though the campaign on Indiegogo is finished, our goals are still ahead of us. We are steadfast in our dedication to these goals. We will still work on DeroGold 24/7 and we are always going to keep trying to come up with new ways to achieve our goals and get DeroGold more world renowned. We are definitely not slowing down our pace, if anything we are emboldened to branch out even further in the pursuit of these goals. Things such as recycling drives, volunteering, and much more are on the horizon. Stay tuned for the next year as more big things come up for DeroGold and we continue with our plan to go global. As a team united, we will do everything we can to make sure that DeroGold is here to stay and that we as a worldwide community make a positive impact on our environment.
Interested in our cause? Join us on Discord. Follow us on Twitter. Star us on GitHub. Subscribe on YouTube. Above all else do everything within your means to share our project and get us out and into the zeitgeist. This is not a project for the few but a project for the masses and we plan to put ourselves out there for the many disenfranchised people who are being let down by a broken system. Year one is in the record books for DeroGold, and we will have many more amazing years to follow. Thank you to everyone who is already a part of our community and we look forward to all the brilliant accomplishments and new faces that this next year will entail.
Sincerely, the DeroGold team.
