Monero Missive for the Week of 2014-07-07

Posted by: Riccardo Spagni (fluffypony)

July 13, 2014

Hello, and welcome to our sixth Monero Missive!

Major Updates

1. The GUI bounty is completed and all payouts have been made. You can view the confirmation of payouts in this post, and bounty recipients have confirmed receipt of their bounties. Just to reiterate the comments made by us in that thread: "As it stands right now, we won't be integrating any of these GUI clients into the main codebase just yet, as there is still a great deal of underlying work that must be done before we can ship a GUI wallet that just about anyone can run (unless we want to make the minimum memory requirement 8gb and the minimum Internet connection requirement 20mbps;) That having been said, we will continue to recommend the actively developed GUI wallets to anyone who prefers to use a GUI wallet, and that is the main purpose behind closing and awarding this bounty now: to have a short-list of recommended GUI wallets." The two GUI wallets we recommend using and that are being actively and continuously developed are:
   • neozaru's wallet: https://github.com/Neozaru/bitmonero-qt
   • Jojatekok's Monero Client .NET: https://github.com/Jojatekok/monero-client / https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=683365.0

2. As you may be aware, there's been a great deal of discussion around dev donations. It wasn't something we thought to raise previously, as it is generally accepted that if you are making money from an open-source project (eg. mining, buying and holding for future profit, whatever) you will generally donate as that is the best way to secure an increase in your "investment". It is important to note that this is not a cryptocurrency that has a big, fat premine (or any sort of instamine / ninjamine / premine), and we are, therefore, completely reliant on the donations of our users. We really, truly appreciate all of the donations that we have received, from early pools such as the now-defunct monero.farm contributing a large portion of their earnings, to our largest donation from ceger, to the ramp-up in dev donations from a screed of pools. Thank you, you guys are the ones that are helping us cover costs and pay for contributors where necessary.

3. The initial work has been completed on analysing the CryptoNote whitepaper, and the review that has come out of it is now available to all. This is an academic approach to analysing it, and is the first step in figuring out whether the principles it espouses are reflected in the Monero code, and (further to that) how we can improve on its deficiencies. You can grab the whitepaper review here: https://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_review.pdf

4. Very early work has begun on reimplementing the mnemonic wordlists in other languages. We are currently doing a German one as a tester to see the amount of effort involved. If you are interested in producing a mnemonic wordlist (1626 words, following a small set of rules) in a language other than German or English please drop us a pm. There will be other translation work coming up (website, tooling etc.), and we will definitely be distributing donations to translators where possible (although they may be relatively small for the work involved).

Until next week!

Post tags : Monero Missives, Monero Research Lab, Usability, External Projects, Funding and Donations, Internationalization