Six years of Decred - Part 2

On February 8th 2022, Decred turned six years old. In the first part of this tour, we looked back at the primary achievements of Decred in its first three years. In many respects these years outlined the ethos of the project and established the hardness of the protocol and the relentless determination and technical ability of the team.

Decred is demonstrating its willingness to build at a slower pace than other projects with a resolve to getting things right and put the security of the project before all other aspects.

As I mentioned before, Decred is taking a direction that no other cryptocurrency has been able to follow. A large part of this is due to its self funded nature with no external backers steering the direction of the project whilst pushing for short term gains.

The first three years were predominantly about building the core features and proving that the concepts are sound and secure. The next three years, are where it gets really interesting. Decred is a living and evolving beast that’s set itself the target of finding and solving problems that others can only talk about. Its primary objectives are to remove middle men, fee takers and rent seekers and unrig the game that has already been set in motion.

So, let’s continue our journey and see what the next three year of Decred’s development cycle looks like.

May 9, 2019 - Lightning Network support activated on the Decred mainnet. Second layer solutions are seen as a way to increase the transactions per second (TPS) without bloating individual blocks or the blockchain. The Lightning network is seen as a good solution for small payments as transaction times are shorter and fees are reduced massively.

This proposal went up for voting with the perception that it would be highly contentious. But the stakeholders were in favour of this development with over 76% (29,106 votes) voting yes and only 1% (408 votes) voting no.

With Lightning activated on our network, Decred is set to benefit from the long term development of this project and the scaling opportunities this system offers.

August 28, 2019 - The Initial Privacy Implementation is Released. Money should be private, it’s the single feature that makes sure all coins are treated the same and confiscation becomes a lot harder.

Decred implemented a system call Coinshuffle++ which integrates a mixing service with the Decred ticket pool. As this pool is guaranteed to have a high throughput it makes privacy on the Decred chain inexpensive, secure and efficient. Decred’s privacy solution also maintains the auditable nature of the coin supply, a feature that other more complex solutions struggle to achieve.

Decred’s ticket pool currently holds over 62% of the DCR coin supply with an average of 41,000 tickets being rotated over the course of 142 days or less. As no third party service is required to achieve this high throughput and high level of privacy, all mixing is achieved relatively cheaply, currently a fraction of a penny, and directly from the Decrediton wallet.

October 29, 2020 - DCRDEX v0.1.0 - The First release of DCRDEX. After two and a half years of discussion, planning and development DCRDEX gets released. This first version is a proof of concept, or ALPHA version, not ready for mainstream use. The goal is to create an open source, fee-less, peer to peer exchange, that can run on any blockchain platform that has Atomic swap capabilities.

Throughout the remaining months of 2020 and 2021, DCRDEX gets many improvements and becomes production ready at the beginning of 2022. Decrediton 1.7 now houses the full implementation of the Decred Decentralised Exchange with built in SPV mode and a Bitcoin Wallet, all of which makes the process of exchanging a lot smoother.

One thing that makes DCRDEX truly unique is that Decred are not aiming to be the gatekeepers of the exchange. Eventually, the hope is that all projects will be able to connect to a single order book through a server mash structure.

Each server operator will be able to onboard new users and instigate their preferred trading pairs and rules. DCRDEX is a massively disruptive technology and a trading environment that the crypto space desperately needs.

In 2022, Decred will push the boundaries of what a cryptocurrency can do, even further, with four ground breaking consensus changes:

* The first is, Decred’s treasury will become fully decentralised, with a two factor authentication process that gives stakeholders the final say with how the money will be spent. This helps Decred work towards its bigger goal of becoming a fully fledged DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation).

With a treasury of over 776,000dcr, which is currently valued at over $50 million, this will be one of the largest transfers of wealth from a single entity to a group of anonymous stakeholders.

* The second consensus change is, Explicit Version Upgrades - Decred will become the first blockchain to implement a hard forks only system for its protocol upgrades . Which will provide an easy, reliable, and efficient method for software and hardware to determine exactly which rules should be applied to a given transaction and script versions.

This consensus change will further embrace increased security, and other desirable properties, that hard forks provide over soft forks.

* The third consensus change is the block, Subsidy Split - The Decred block reward is changing from 60% miners, 30% Stakeholders , 10% Treasury to 10% miners, 80% Stakeholders , 10% Treasury.

This is due to perceived and witnessed undesirable behaviour of centralised mining organisations towards the Decred chain. Which has caused sell pressure and price suppression for at least the past four years.

Decred’s research shows, that mining is already more centralised that most realise and that other Proof of work blockchains are suffering from the same conditions as Decred. Shortly before this proposal went live Zcash announced that over the next three year it would be working towards moving to a pure proof of stake system, one can only assume they have identified similar issues.

* and finally, Automatic Ticket Revocations - This will remove the requirement for stakeholders to manually revoke missed and expired tickets. Making the user experience of redeeming funds for tickets that didn’t vote a lot easier.

Throughout Decred’s short six year life, the project has achieved many new frontiers in an environment that requires innovation and careful processes to maintain the security and integrity of the protocol.

In this time, Decred has upgraded its consensus no less than six time, without causing a chain split or contentious hard fork. Proving that good governance and a systemised approach to conflict resolution can be achieved. The outcome is a community that has not fractured and everyone is working in the best interests of the project.

During this time Decred has produce over 645,000 blocks consistently, without problems, delays, hacks, malicious behaviour or scandal. The current coin supply is approaching 14 million dcr of the 21 million max supply, with a total of approximately 7 million dcr Left to mine.

Decred’s privacy participation is currently above 60% of the coin supply mixed, making it one of the most fungible coins in the crypto currency space.

Decred has one of the highest performing stakeholder participation rate, currently over 60% of the coin supply (or 8.7 million dcr). Proposal votes are also well attended, with an average turn out of over 60% of the available ticket pool placing an active yes or no vote.

Stakeholders have voted on, no less than 114 Proposals. 70 of which have been approved and 44 Have been rejected. Spending a grand total, to date, of 467,452 dcr (approximately $30 million).

In the Decred Treasure, to date, there is over 764,000 dcr (approximately $50 million) with a further 719,000 dcr to enter the treasury from the block reward over the next hundred years with the majority of which being received over the next ten years.

Due to its hyper secure POW/POS consensus mechanism Decred has consistently remained expensive to attack, frequently above $500 million per hour.

So, with all this Wonderfull development happening in the background, what do you think Decred will achieve on the lead up to its tenth birthday? The first six years is where it started, the next phase is where it becomes unstoppable!

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Tips are also appreciated! If you wish to donate via Decred $DCR, here is the Decred Society Receive Address: DscC8isCpbbSbgY9gRXLdcnLK4PmMbJeB5K