MintCoin development is not dead, just resting.

It has been just over a month since the last development update. Your intrepid author has been distracted by things, so progress has been slow. Fear not! Some work has been done, and we will try to pick up the pace in the future.

Yet Another MintCoin Exchange

The altilly exchange carries MintCoin, with BTC, ETH, LTC, and even USDT pairs available.

https://www.altilly.com/

It looks very cool.

Code Changes

EuroCentium has been working on the user interface of the wallet, and put together a presentation with possible ideas for changes. These improvements can probably be done without code changes, which means that designers do not necessarily need to depend on programmers to help with the wallet.

EuroCentium has also submitted a proposed default MintCoin.conf to be used in new setups. This addresses an open issue:

https://github.com/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet/issues/65

Release Status

Somewhat embarrassingly no progress has been made on the release.

Efforts to push binaries from Travis CI to another host for packaging need a bit of reorganization, since the pull request for anything containing secrets (the user name and password of the destination in this case) has to come from the repository itself. Once that is done then we can get back to packaging and testing the wallet release.

Bring back that Minty feeling,
Shane Kerr

MintCoin Development Update 2018-05-04

Hello everyone! It was Dodenherdenking today here in Holland. We remembered the dead from World War II and later wars with two minutes of silence. Let us all hope that the current wars and conflicts going on around the world today come to an end as quickly as possible, and that soon the only invasions will be new crypo currencies taking over the world.

On a happier note, it is also Star Wars Day! May the Fourth be with MintCoin.

Ciao MintCoin!

We got our first submission of a new translation of the MintCoin menus from pEteRbAn. He is going through the Qt localization for the coin and providing an Italian version. With luck we'll have Italian support for the MintCoin wallet in the next release.

MintCoin Project Continuity

One issue that I have struggled with since starting on MintCoin a few months ago is making sure we have project continuity, meaning the ability of the project to continue independent of any one individual. I believe that the project should try to make sure that it is always possible for someone new to pick up the work and add useful or fun things to it, even if other people may leave the project.

Using GitHub for the code is a good start for this. It is free, and is publicly available to anyone. Coders can make changes to the code and submit them using workflows that are familiar to most people working on open source code these days.

Having Travis CI build and test carries this on further, since it sits on top of GitHub and is also free and open. Today we build for almost all of our target platforms on Travis CI, and the results of that are visible for anyone interested.

Over the last couple weeks I have extended the Travis CI to publish the results of the builds to MEGA.nz. Like GitHub and Travis CI, MEGA is free, and runs on servers maintained by a company without any work needed by anyone in the MintCoin community. It provides ability to allow only users with the password to upload files, but also publish them in a way that anyone can read it, for example a recent build went here:

https://mega.nz/#F!nLZiTaDR!xTSt65WWAYH-78My09WJrw

It is easy to update the Travis CI to publish to a different MEGA account if this one is lost, or even to publish somewhere else like Amazon S3, Google Drive, or many other similar services.

On the development side we are starting to get a reasonable set of tools that can keep MintCoin alive no matter what happens to any one member of the development team.

However, there are a few things missing:

• We do not have administrator access to the GitHub MintCoin account. This means that we cannot add or remove users. None of the existing administrators has replied to requests for this.

• The social media situation is a bit of a mess. The owner of the most popular Twitter account does not actively participate in the project any more (please use @MintCoin_, which is run by an active participant). Nobody knows the owner of the Facebook page, although he has declared himself the CEO of MintCoin.

• The web site is not actively maintained, and there are at least 3 of these that a new user may consider the "real" MintCoin site.

Everything can be fixed, and I think that we can be a community coin that also has enough tools and structure to make it run effectively. The goal should be to make sure that we everyone can help in their own way, while the project is able to continue even as people move on to other endeavors.

Working with Other Coins

I saw that Bitcoin Green was added to Cryptopia, and their goals seem similar to MintCoin. I was thinking maybe we could work together, and possibly even merge the coins at some point.

More recently I was approached by some folks from Social Send Coin who are interested in doing some collaborative work, I think mostly in the area of marketing.

I tend to think that we can work with other coin communities to make all coins stronger, as long as we have similar goals and technologies. If you are interested in this - or hate the idea - please speak up.

Code Changes

The only code change since the last update - except for our new translation - was getting the wallet to send the output of the build to a site so we can build our release packages, as mentioned in the discussion on continuity above.

Release Status

Since the last update, we have manged to push changes from all builds to the MEGA site so we can build release packages.

The release will be "2.1-beta1". The Etherpad with the plan is here:

https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/MintCoin-2.1-release-planning

You can always look at the current state of the Travis CI for MintCoin here:

https://travis-ci.org/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet

For the release, we have two pieces of work (yes we said that last week, but this time for sure):

• Add 32-bit Linux support to the Travis CI builds
  This should be possible with something called multiarch; a system where Linux can include libraries for more than one CPU family at a time. Using multiarch we should be able to build for both i686 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) CPU on Travis CI.

• Build the packages for release For Windows we actually have MSI files, which should let us make an installers. Likewise for macOS we have some stuff to put into a DMG file which may provide an installer for Apple systems too. Finally, we need to include a snapshot in our release packages.

GitHub Repository Status

The official GitHub repository remains:

https://github.com/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet

No issues were closed in the official repository. We added one issue:

• Always create MintCoin.conf on startup
  We should make sure that we always make a configuration file when the MintCoin wallet starts, if none is present yet. This will make it easier for users to customize their setup if needed.

Goal Recap

While the main focus is on the next release, there are also other goals, such as:

• Speeding up the initial sync
• Packages for popular distributions (like Debian and Fedora packages)
• Wallet code automated testing
• Reducing the memory footprint
• Investigating mobile wallets

I've got a good feeling about this,
Shane Kerr

MintCoin Development Update 2018-05-14

Bonjour MintCoin followers!

We didn't have a lot of progress on the MintCoin front since the last update, and your intrepid developer has just arrived in Marseilles. I will be busy with the RIPE meeting there (making the Internet better) instead of working on MintCoin (making crypto currency better). So, this will be the last update for a couple of weeks, when we hope to have lots of progress to report.

Additional Blockchain Snapshot

Our usual source of MintCoin blockchain snapshots, https://snapshot.mintcoin.zone, was down for some time and the maintainer away temporarily. Making another snapshot was not difficult, but finding a place to host it was trickier.

I wanted a place that was free (because I am cheap, and also because I wanted a place that anyone else could easily set up). I needed something like 10 Gbyte of storage, because we want to be able to upload a new version of the snapshot at the same time people are downloading the old one, and this won't fit in 5 Gbyte. I also want basically unlimited transfers, since it does not take very many people downloading a snapshot to use a lot of transfer bandwidth.

People suggested Google Drive, which would probably be fine. But I am already using my Google storage for other things, and didn't really feel like dealing with the hassle of getting a second Google account for this purpose.

I ended up using hubiC for this purpose. It offers 25 Gbyte of free storage, which is enough, and I could not find any mention of a transfer cap. It is a bit slow, so I am willing to consider other suggestions for a hosting site, but it does work.

You can download the current snapshot here:

http://ovh.to/efYTpDa

My plan is to make weekly snapshots, and use a redirect link which always points to the latest version. This should provide some redundancy - having two snapshots should allow us to bootstrap the MintCoin wallet reliably until we get a new wallet out which includes one.

Donations

I got two donations of MintCoin, one from an individual and one from MintyAllDay's MintCoin development fund. Thank you all!

My current plan is to think about setting up a more organized way for people to donate, but I really want to wait until a new version of the wallet is out first. Basically, I feel like until that is delivered no real benefits have been delivered to users so it does not make too much sense.

Code Changes

There have been no new code changes since the last update, although the Italian translation was updated. It is not yet merged into the main branch, but will be as soon as the translator decides that it is good enough.

Release Status

There has not been any progress on the next release since the last update.

GitHub Repository Status

The official GitHub repository remains:

https://github.com/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet

No issues were closed or added in the official repository.

Goal Recap

While the main focus is on the next release, there are also other goals, such as:

• Speeding up the initial sync
• Packages for popular distributions (like Debian and Fedora packages)
• Wallet code automated testing
• Reducing the memory footprint
• Investigating mobile wallets

Slow and steady mints the race,
Shane Kerr

Welcome to the E-mail Debt Forgiveness Day edition of the MintCoin Development Update. In that spirit, your humble author hopes that you will forgive this late development update.

It was definitely a quiet week for MintCoin, with King's Day and other things distracting our developers, who all seem to live in Holland.

Windows Startup Problems: Workaround Delivered

In the last update we reported that there were some error messages related to problems for users of the Windows wallet. In an awesome feat of debugging, Rebelway518 discovered that for some reason disabling the splash screen fixes the problem. Here's the workaround:

Make a shortcut to Mintcoin-Qt.exe. Right click on the shortcut->Properties. Then add -splash=0 to the end of the target string. That way you'll only need to double click the shortcut in the future.

Thanks to Rebelway518 for sticking with it! We'll see if this is still necessary on the wallet when we get a new version out, and if so we'll try to get an actual fix.

Code Changes

Due to other committments, no code changes were made since the last update.

Release Status

Since the last update, we have manged to push changes from the Linux and Windows builds to a site where they can be used to build release packages. The macOS builds are still not pushing properly, but should hopefully be working soon.

The release will be "2.1-beta1". The Etherpad with the plan is here:

https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/MintCoin-2.1-release-planning

You can always look at the current state of the Travis CI for MintCoin here:

https://travis-ci.org/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet

That means that we still have two major things left to do before the beta:

• Add 32-bit Linux support to the Travis CI builds
  This should be possible with something called multiarch; a system where Linux can include libraries for more than one CPU family at a time. Using multiarch we should be able to build for both i686 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) CPU on Travis CI.

• Export the results of the Travis CI build for macOS Exports of everything but macOS are working, so once this is done we will have all of our binaries in a place that we can easily distribute and test from.

GitHub Repository Status

The official GitHub repository remains:

https://github.com/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet

No issues were added or closed in the official repository.

Goal Recap

While the main focus is on the next release, there are also other goals, such as:

• Speeding up the initial sync
• Packages for popular distributions (like Debian and Fedora packages)
• Wallet code automated testing
• Reducing the memory footprint

Apologies again for the late update as well as the slow progress. Patience dear MintCoin fans!

Next Time Moar Mint,
Shane Kerr