It's been over a month since the last update, so I'm sure you are all eager for the latest MintCoin news. This month one of the other MintCoin team members has helped me write the update. I think that it is nice to have more voices updating the MintCoin world, and hopefully you will too.
The current team working on MintCoin chats every day via Telegram, but we have never spoken to each other. We had our first conference call on 2018-09-19. While a short call, it was nice to hear the voices of the people that have been dedicating time to MintCoin. We intend to have them more frequently to help coordinate our efforts.
You've probably noticed that last month we have lost control of our main website and basically all our media channels. This was due to the fact that one of our oldest and most appreciated MintCoin member MintyAllDay stopped running the site.
We are still trying to get in touch with him but in the meantime we have started a new website, https://www.mintcoinofficial.eu, and other social media channels. We also have volunteers posting news into those channels to improve the public's MintCoin awareness. So please share, like and follow these social media channels amongst your friends and cryptogroups, this will help us to spread the news faster and wider.
Although we like our fresh and Minty main website we also noticed that it is not very SEO friendly meaning that it is hard to find through search engines, it is also time consuming to add new content and/or news.
So we are in the background preparing an additional informational MintCoin information website where we will post news and updates in the future and by doing this improving our SEO and visibility on the web.
With a shiny new web site and Twitter account, we decided to get references fixed everywhere. We've had pretty pretty good progress, with a semi-official versions of:
- Web site (https://www.mintcoinofficial.eu)
- E-mail (info@mintcoinofficial.eu)
- Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MintCoin-Official-Community-328740334335003)
- Twitter (@MintCoin_Team)
- Reddit (r/MintCoin)
- Telegram (https://t.me/OfficialMintcoin)
- Discord (https://discord.gg/g9EeSk3)
- GitHub (https://github.com/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet)
For Facebook and Twitter there are old sites or accounts that do not reflect current MintCoin work, but we are still hopeful we can eventually get everything fixed.
We also managed to get information updated in a lot of sites that are run by other people, like Coin Market Cap, Coingecko, CryptoPanic, and the Cryptos and Coins Wiki. Additionally we are working with exchanges that carry MintCoin to get their information about MintCoin up to date.
There are sadly sites which we may never be able to get fixed, such as old GitHub repositories, YouTube channels, and so on. If you know people who were around years ago on MintCoin please ask them to contact us so we can either administer the site for them or just give them the current correct MintCoin information.
Finally, if you find a site that has an outdated or in any other way incorrect information about MintCoin, please let us know and we'll try to get it fixed as best we can.
We would like MintCoin and the MintCoin community to be as welcoming as possible. One tool used to help in this is a Code of Conduct. This is a document which writes down how we expect to treat each other, and what happens if someone acts in a way that we do not accept, such as by harassing someone or with other unacceptable behavior.
I took an example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki and modified it slightly. A draft is available here:
https://github.com/shane-kerr/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet/blob/code-of-conduct/doc/code-of-conduct.md
This is not final, and needs to be updated to make it more minty (it feels very legalistic and American in tone, which is probably not appropriate for a relaxed and friendly community like MintCoin). I also need to make sure all of the administrators are happy to help with enforcement. And most importantly, we need to make sure that the community is willing to accept whatever code we end up with.
We have had times in the past where people crossed the line from vigorous disagreement into personal attacks, which doesn't feel minty at all to me. A Code of Conduct should help us all remember to stay nice.
Another topic that we frequently heard from our community is the availability/location of the bootstrap to get synchronized with the blockchain and start minting.
Hence we have launched a torrent with a bootstrap of the last blockchain of our own wallets. We will update the torrent more frequently (we are committed to once a month). We recommend that you only download the torrent file through https://www.mintcoinofficial.eu and not by links handed over by other sources.
The dev team is also looking into possibility of implementing that functionality directly into the MintCoin Wallet.
Clicking on the "MintCoin Bootstrap Torrent" button should open your favourite Torrent downloader. Just let it run until you received the complete file and follow the installation instructions.
We would also appreciate if you keep "seeding" this file in your Torrent Client for 45 days to support the other MintCoin users that download the bootstrap you can limit in most clients the bandwidth upload. Don't worry this download will be automatically be invalid after 45 days when a new a bootstrap is published.
Then an older topic whether or not there existed a MintCoin paper wallet like the project that we have on GitHub. It has always existed and was online at:
https://walletgenerator.net/?currency=MintCoin
We are now looking into on hosting it onto our own servers and domain so that we can guarantee that there is no sneakpeaking during online usage and creation of the paper wallets keys.
With all the other work going on, only a few minor updates to the wallet have been made since the last MintCoin development update:
-
Fix warnings from recent gcc versions
This one may actually have caught a few minor bugs, but is mostly a fix for compiler warnings. -
Work around evil Qt prejudice against en_DK
en_DKis The wonderful en_DK locale but Qt does not support it. However, with a minor tweak we can get proper ISO formatted dates & times in our MintCoin wallet. -
Update all of our contact and social media information
As mentioned above, we did a lot of fixes for our social media. These are now updated in the GitHub repository as well.
We also have a 8 new issues reported on GitHub. This is a lot, and we will look into them. The good news is that this means that there are people using the new wallet and they have found out how to report problems so we can fix them!
Some research into how to download torrents has been done, but it is far from complete. It is possible that we may be able to speed up syncing in other ways and not need to do this in the wallet itself, but more investigation is needed.
After weeks of synchronizing, we finally have an Orange Pi running the MintCoin wallet! This is a relatively cheap SBC (single-board computer), like the Raspberry Pi. What allows it to run MintCoin while the Raspberry Pi cannot is that it has 2 GByte of RAM. It seems like a nice solution for low-power minting, with something like 1 to 3 watts of power needed.
It can receive and send MintCoin without any problems. It is currently holding some MintCoin that will mature in 16 more days, and then we can confirm that minting also works.
Once we have verified that the wallet works, we will provide information on how to set up your own. If there is interest we may sell these with the MintCoin wallet pre-installed so you can transfer your MintCoin there and let it quietly mint for you.
When MintCoin was selling for 2 satoshi recently, I wanted to convert some of my other altcoin to MintCoin. I was unsure whether I should first convert to Bitcoin, or Litecoin, and so on. Also, which exchange would give the best rates?
I wrote a tool which would help predict this for me, which you can use here:
https://anguished-memorable-doctor.anvil.app/
It connects to the three exchanges that carry MintCoin and have an API that works from your browser. (Using the API from your browser is handy for me because it means I don't have to set up a backend server somewhere, and it is nice for you because nobody has to see what conversions you are doing except the exchanges themselves.)
It actually looks at the order books and figures out how much each transaction would give you, including exchange fees. So, for example, imagine that you wanted to convert Bitcoin Cash (BCH) into MintCoin (MINT). This makes a lot of sense because Bitcoin Cash is Proof-of-Work (PoW) and therefore not really sustainable in the same way that MintCoin is. 🍃
So, using the took you can see that right now if have 0.1 BCH and you convert first to Bitcoin (BTC) you will end up with about 260k MINT, whereas if you convert first to Dogecoin (DOGE) you will end up with about 285k MINT, and if you convert first to Litecoin (LTC) you will end up with about 350k MINT. That's about ⅓ more MINT!
Markets change all the time, so you would benefit from using the tool whenever you are thinking of buying MINT.
While I wrote the tool for MintCoin, it supports all of the crypto-currencies at all exchanges. I don't recommend using it for anything other than buying more MintCoin, but feel free to experiment if you ever need to use any other currencies. 😉
That's it for this update.
Stay Minty,
Shane Kerr
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
