Feathercoin Official Weekly Update #29

Tuesday 22^nd April 2014

Celebrations

Feathercoin Key Stats
370 days since genesis block creation
Approx. 40,600,000 of Feathercoins created
Approx. 17 days behind target generation rate

We have just departed a big milestone and how better to celebrate than with a mandatory software update and a celebratory drink at the Oxford Blue.

Update Your Wallets Please

by @Uncle_Muddy

It's not a drill friends, Feathercoin 0.8.6.2 has now been released and it is a mandatory upgrade! You can find it on the homepage. Not only for the wallet application but for all pool software. The new release also uses the latest version of OpenSSL so has the fix against the Heartbleed vulnerability.

The aim of the new version is to limit the effect of multipools, they are currently mining Feathercoin in such a way that leaves no room at all for people who want to solely mine us. Our last effort to fix this issue worked for a while but the multipools figured out a way to use the last change against us and manage to mine us without moving the difficulty as much as they should but leave the difficulty higher overall. Considering this Wrapper and Wellenreiter have put months into analyzing our current difficulty and multipools including how they mine other coins, not just us.

The new update is available to download from the front page of the website. The changes are already live on GitHub in the master-0.8 default repository. This update is mandatory and involves a hard fork on block 204,639 to add the following features in a defence against strip mining.

1. Block times.

The Feathercoin Transaction block time will be reduced from 2.5 minutes to 1 minute. The miner block payment will reduce to 80 FTC to compensate for the increased frequency but maintain the same coin supply..

2. eHRC or enhanced Hash Rate Compensation,

eHRC uses the standard Bitcoin protocol to calculate the the next block difficulty, but adds 2 extra historical block lookups, or block average times to calculate the new difficulty more accurately. The difficulty ReTarget has been increased to every block.

Please help us make the move as simplistic as possible, by upgrading now and making sure the pools you are using are aware of the upcoming hard fork.

Birthday Bash

by @ChrisJ

Itâ€™s someoneâ€™s birthday party this Saturday and it would be great if you could join the fun at the Oxford Blue.

Donâ€™t worry if you are not in our region of the globe there may be a live linkup on our Youtube Channel and by the way, remember our video that we made back in the summer? It now has now received over 36,000 views and I still get people coming up to me in London telling me how it inspired them to get in to crypto.

On a personal note I would like to say that being here in this community with you all has had a very positive impact on my life. This domain certainly sucks you in to a time warp and I feel that right now there is more that we are thinking than we are saying and often we forget to speak our minds. But I think I speak for everyone who has been in to crypto-currencies for more than 12 months that it can be exhausting, in a good way. Not just in terms of work but also it movement really hijacks the mind, I cannot stop thinking about all of the ideas and possibilities this technology could have.

Feathercoin came in to my life and it gave me a purpose. I was just a troll in the Trollbox, unsure of what to do with my life. I had been sitting on my hands for a year after quitting my job. Then I saw FTC float on BTCe, I watched it go up to 1 Bitcoin and crash back down. I noticed what Bush was saying on the forums and admired the way he just pushed himself out there, doing something he was afraid of and doing, what at the time, few people dared to do but that in the end his courage paved the way and now everyone does it.

Feathercoin set the standard, we made it safe for other people to enter the market. I get more and more emails with every week from people entering the space asking me for advice, asking me what it was like. Right now I feel that the more educated public are waiting for the next big rise in popularity. I have been penciled in to give another talk at Hull City by David Gilson in a few months.

Thank-you very much to all of you for making this experience so memorable. It has taught me a lot not least because we tend to learn the most when we are surprised.

Letâ€™s Talk Bitcoin with Andreas

by @ChrisJ

I was pleasantly surprised when Andreas approached me to appear on Letâ€™s Talk Bitcoin back in February. My calendar got so full I completely forgot about it and then people on Twitter started sending their thanks.

I hate listening to myself so I have not had the courage to listen back yet but if you would like to take a listen check out Episode 101 - The Why of Bitcoin.

I want your feedback, questions and critique. You are free to challenge me here in the forum or on Twitter @MrChrisEllis. I am still trying to develop my understanding of this technology and its underlying philosophy so I welcome any intellectual testing.

Merchant Watch

by @Ruthie

Last week Bush and I with kiddies in tow met up with ChekaZ and his friend Sven to visit Dahms Vineyard in Germany.

JÃ¼rgen Dahms gave us all the pleasure of a tour of the vinyard where the wine is grown and historic castle buildings where they have the wine tasting events.
After the tour of the castle and surrounding vinyard we also got to take a tour around the shop and where they produce their wine.

Peterstirn, the castle of the Marquis Berthold from the 10th Century is the landmark of the city of Schweinfurt and the winery Dahms.
Here, in the castle, family owned , the wine tastings and the annual wine festivals that take up an old tradition of the city . On the grounds of the castle today is also the home of JÃ¼rgen Dahm family , which was restored in 1999.
The castle can only be visited as part of wine tasting .

The Castle above the Main River is nestled in 2.5 hectares of vineyards, where the classic Franconia grape varieties are grown:
Silvaner, MÃ¼ller-Thurgau, Bacchus, Scheurebe, Traminer and Riesling and red wine as the interspecific varieties Rondo.

Most importantly Dahms winery shipping deatils:

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Luxuembourg, Netherlands, Spain, France, GB and Italy.
If your country is not listed, just drop them an email for shipping in your area.

You can find the last official newsletter here: Rewarding the Loyal. Today special thanks go to @Chrisj, @Ruthie and @Uncle_Muddy 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.