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Author: Eric Voskuil
Date:  
To: Libbitcoin Development
Subject: [Libbitcoin] version3 update, version4 info
I was unable to complete the release before leaving on a short holiday.
I've pushed a couple of critical fixes since returning and added a
server feature to accept block submission and validation (in a manner
identical to tx submit and validation).

As far as I know presently there are no outstanding issues, although I'm
awaiting feedback from out various production test sites and for our
several community servers to become fully synced and verified with
server certificates. I'll be writing documentation this week (via the
GitHub wikis for respective repos).

Work is already well underway on version4. Many of the planned features
are documented via issues in the various GitHub repos. Version3 ended up
getting a lot closer to the version4 that we originally intended. The
primary objective for version3 was to get the server (and node) to
production quality. While there are still some feature gaps, we have
achieved that objective. The primary objective for version4 is to
elevate the server to very high performance mining platform.

The node/server is already the fastest validation platform, achieving
200ms block validation. This is without compact blocks and without the
scalability limitations that arise from an in-memory tx pool, utxo store
or signature cache. Once we complete compact block work we expect to
achieve 50ms block validation. Manageability and client-server
performance are also excellent in v3. We'll build on this in v4 to
produce high scale/performance pool services.

There is other great stuff coming as well. We already have variants
running Litecoin on libbitcoin. In v4 we will move the remaining chain
parameters into config and add the couple of forks that will allow
libbitcoin to be configured to run Bitcoin and Litecoin mainnet, testnet
and regtest (i.e. without recompile). While our philosophy is to not
develop for alcoins, testnet and regtest are important for development
testing, and Litecoin is a tiny bit of additional functionality given
the existing generalization of libbitcoin.

Explorer is very mature but will continue to evolve alongside the server
API and add useful command line tooling. As for other libraries, Network
(P2P), Protocol (ZeroMQ), and Consensus are now very mature and I do not
expect significant changes in them. Client is due for refactoring (based
on the v3 work in Protocol and Server), but is in good shape otherwise.
Libbitcoin is very mature but will continue to evolve with the needs of
the other libraries (and may get renamed to libbitcoin-system).
Blockchain and Database are in great shape, but will see the most change
as we mature Server/Node functionality.

It was great to see members of the libbitcoin community in London. Took
the old commie train from St Petersburg to Moscow, then spent a couple
of days in Baku. Nice to be home where I can get real work done :).

e