Dear Community,
The Bytecoin Development Team has decided to make one more important announcement, which is actually a direct consequence of the events/actions that took place last week. We’ve tried to adopt this text for easy reading, however we’ll be able to give more technical details today, May 16th, at our AMA.
At the very end of the previous year we released the 2018 roadmap for the 1st and 2nd quarters of the year. Though as we see it now, to make it happen we need more time to investigate some additional technical aspects and change the order of the actions which need to be taken in the nearest time.
To begin with, we’ve reviewed our plans and have decided to switch from a “cautiously optimistic” strategy to a “very accurate” one. This is a necessary measure to avoid any kind of drawbacks after the hardfork is released. The main idea of this is to prevent the network lags which took place May 8th - 10th. And there’s an ideal tool to avoid such problems - public testnet. The entire community will be able to check how the updated system will operate and there will be no need to make additional updates after the hardfork in the P2P protocol.
The other reason for the delay is to change the logic on how the P2P protocol works. The P2P protocol is effectively a part of the consensus: it’s the language in which decentralized clients communicate with each other. Bytecoin software uses P2P to broadcast the data over the network. The current protocol contains some things that could be improved, while the new one will be simplified to provide the network with better performance.
One more essential thing that has to be mentioned is the amount of clients which are still staying on the old (2.x.x) versions. Despite the fact that these versions were released more than a year ago, quite a large amount of users and merchants (about 19% according to our estimates) are still using these versions. We can’t conduct a hardfork in a month because it may cause a network blackout again. In that case we have to choose between the responsibility for the system health and up-to-date checkpoint passing. Obviously, we won’t let another blackout happen and we will take care of the network’s credibility.
Soon the new ETAs will be announced. For now we’re welcoming you to take a part in our AMA which will be live today, May 16th, on our subreddit to ask the questions regarding the Binance listing and network situation.
The bottom line is that we want to make our software more secure and more stable. Not just for us, but for our users and our community as a whole. We want to make Bytecoin the best it can possible be.
Thank you for your support.
Yours truly,
The Bytecoin team