Feathercoin Official Weekly Update #28

Tuesday 15^th April 2014

Rewarding the Loyal

Feathercoin Key Stats
363 days since genesis block creation
Approx. 39,800,000 of Feathercoins created
Approx. 17.1 days behind target generation rate

One of the biggest challenges we face in this emerging digital economy is striking the right balance of incentives between the loyal miners and those who mine for nothing but short term profit, sometimes referred to as strip mining.

Those who believe in the idea itself and continue to secure our blockchain deserve the ongoing commitment of the developers to ensure they are fairly rewarded for their effort.

Profit cannot be the only goal, it must be the result of getting things right. The ability to relate the long term to the short term. And showing up is half the work which is why this week we must pay special thanks to @Bushstar, @Wrapper, @Uncle_Muddy, @Wellenreite, @kstenson and @llocans who continue to chip away at the code meaning we continue to make an impact even during a time when the public attention on crypto-currency is waning.

The public may not realise this but the work taking place right now is probably some of the most important work going on when it comes to the long term survivability of a blockchain based currency. The people we need to be celebrating are the ones honest enough to realise how little they know and determined enough to do the work necessary to find out what works.

Feathercoin 0.8.6.2

by @Bushstar

Feathercoin 0.8.6.2 is now released and is available to download from the front page of the official Feathercoin website. This update is mandatory and involves a hard fork on block 204,639 which will happen roughly at 12:00GMT on the 24^th April. The new release uses the latest version of OpenSSL so has the fix against the Heartbleed vulnerability.

Wrapper and Wellenreiter have made simulations to see the effect of multipools on us and can see how bad their impact on us is. They have also been able to use these simulations to work out the best possible defense against these pools. After months of analysis the best possible solution was chosen and we have spent the last month running this on the testnet in various forms to gather as much data as possible. The testnet showed that the changes performed exactly as the simulations predicted and that the difficulty closely follows the network hashrate. This is a sign of quality in the simulations that were created, we have powerful tools for developing Feathercoin.

A hard fork can only mean one thing... an excuse to reuse this cool graphic!

After block 204,639 the following changes will come into effect.

Block time reduced to 1 minute. We handle more transactions and reduce the window for double spend.
Block reward is reduced to 80 coins a block to maintain the same inflation model. 80 coins * 2.5 minutes = 200 coins
Retarget every block compared to every 126 block currently
Use combined average from 15, 120 and 480 block averages with .25 damping

The new Mac client has been built with QR code support. Note that there was a 0.8.6.1 release that had an issue with full blockchain sync, you are having trouble synchronizing the blockchain please download and install 0.8.6.2.

Android Feathercoin Wallet 2

by @Uncle_Muddy

You may remember a couple of weeks ago we reported that the Android version of the feathercoin wallet had stopped working. Well I'm very pleased to say that thanks to the hard work of Wellenreiter, kstenson, and llocans we now have a mobile wallet app back!

The new wallet available now on the Google Play store

Further development work is planned for the app in the near future, if your interested in getting involved please put a post in the original development thread.

Link to the App in the play store and Android Wallet App Upgrade/Install Guide

We also owe thanks to David Gilson for reporting on this in his article in Coinbuzz.

Merchant Watch

by Ruthie

bitbooks.co

BitBooks.co is a marketplace for self-published authors (or their agents) to sell books directly to readers using nothing but digital currency. We currently accept Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Feathercoin and Litecoin.

Not only can you buy books from us, if your a budding author you can publish your books with them too, more information can be found here

This now regular section of the news letter, is not far away from getting a new section of the site to provide a merchant directory, we hope to have the work completed and the new section setup by the end of April so keep your eyes open for even more places to spend your feathers.

You can find the last official newsletter here: Progressive. Today special thanks go to @Uncle_Muddy, @Bushstar & @ChrisJ for their contributions to this newsletter.

You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook or come on to the forum to stay up to date.

Thank-you for your time.