BitTube hard fork pre-announcement

Dear BitTubers!

The BitTube blockchain will undergo some upgrades. The chain will be hard forked for improved transaction efficiency and other benefits. Additionally, this upgrade comes with several wallet fixes and improved functionality.

This hard fork is still based on the current CryptoNight hashing algorithm CN Saber. In several months we are looking forward to upgrade to the Cuckoo/Cuckeroo algorithm found in cryptocurrencies like Grin. This change will then speed up confirmation times by an order of magnitude.

Update 6th of Apr: The hardfork will happen around 27th of April at 58700 block height.

What’s new?

Below are some noteworthy improvements that might be interesting to some of our users.

Updated Bulletproofs to Version 2

This reduces the transaction size by 24 bits (3 bytes) per transaction. With Bulletproofs, block size scales logarithmically with the number of transactions. You can see this firsthand on the BitTube blockchain explorer. Lower per-transaction size means more transaction space per block, lower fees and faster wallet synchronization.

Pay-for-service system

Daemons intended for public use can be set up to require payment in the form of hashes in exchange for RPC (remote procedure call) service. This enables public daemons to receive payment for their work over a large number of calls. This system behaves similarly to a pool: payment takes the form of valid blocks every so often, yielding a large one-off payment, rather than continuous micro-payments.

Importantly, third parties can use this system as a “paywall” layer. Users of a service could pay by mining BitTube to the service provider’s address. This system might find its way into our future products.

For more details read the commit message here.

Bug fixes and improvements

• Synchronization and verification speed ups.
• Fixed: Generating wallet on wrong block height (based on date/time) when the wallet is not connected to daemon. This fixes the bug where users would find 0 coins in a restored wallet due to incorrect block height when starting synchronization.
• Fees are now based on median block weight.
• Added protection in case an adversary tries to perform traffic analysis between a wallet and a node, by limiting info leaks and some isolation protection by rotating a small amount of nodes.
• IPv6 support.
• Many new CLI wallet commands and command-line switches for power users
• Many bug fixes.

Consensus changes

• Forbid transactions with just one output.
• Use effective median block weight for penalty.
• Enforced 10 block minimum output age for use in rings
• Reject signatures in coinbase* transactions
• Reject v1 coinbase* transactions

*) Note: this refers to the blockchain coinbase, a technical term, not the company Coinbase.

Wrapping up

To reiterate, soon we will announce when the hard fork will take place. If you are a GUI wallet user, we will inform you via our social channels when it’s necessary to update your wallet.

Thanks for reading. That’s all for now!

Your BitTube Team