To prevent a single or very small number of minters receiving the rewards for an entire tier, share bins can now require "activation". This adds the requirement that a minimum number of accounts must be present in a share bin before it is considered active. When inactive, the rewards and minters are added to the previous tier.
Summary of new functionality:
- If a share bin has more than one, but less than 30 accounts present, the rewards and accounts are shifted to the previous share bin.
- This process is iterative, so the accounts can shift through multiple tiers until the minimum number of accounts is met, OR the share bin's starting level is less than shareBinActivationMinLevel.
- Applies to level 7+, so that no backwards support is needed. It will only take effect once the first account reaches level 7.
This requires hot swapping the sharesByLevel data to combine tiers where needed, so is a considerable shift away from the immutable array that was in place previously.
All existing and new unit tests are now passing, however a lot more testing will be needed.
- Reduce concurrent reward share limit from 6 to 3 (or from 5 to 2 when including self share) - as per community vote.
- Founders remain at 6 (5 when including self share) - also decided in community vote.
- When all slots are being filled, require that at least one is a self share, so that not all can be used for sponsorship.
- Activates at future undecided timestamp.
This should prevent the failed transactions that are encountered when issuing two or more in a short space of time. Using a feature trigger (hard fork) to release this, to avoid potential consensus confusion around the time of the update (older versions could consider the main chain invalid until updating).
Note: this relies on (a modified version of) liblitewallet-jni which is not included, but will ultimately be compiled for each supported architecture and hosted on QDN.
LiteWalletJni code is based on https://github.com/PirateNetwork/cordova-plugin-litewallet - thanks to @CryptoForge for the help in getting this up and running.
Note: it's important that this timestamp is set on a 1-hour boundary (such as 16:00:00) to ensure a clean switchover.
# Conflicts:
# src/main/java/org/qortal/block/BlockChain.java
Lite nodes can't sync or mint blocks, and they also have a very limited ability to verify unconfirmed transactions due to a lack of contextual information (i.e. the blockchain). For now, most validation is skipped and they simply act as relays to help get transactions around the network. Full and topOnly nodes will disregard any invalid transactions upon receipt as usual, and since the lite nodes aren't signing any blocks, there is little risk to the reduced validation, other than the experience of the lite node itself. This can be tightened up considerably as the lite nodes become more powerful, but the current approach works as a PoC.
This is currently for name registration transactions only, but can be adapted (or duplicated) for other transaction types when needed.
Note: this switches from a greater-than (>) to a greater-than-or-equal (>=) timestamp comparison, as it makes more sense this way. It shouldn't affect the previous transition since there were no REGISTER_NAME transactions at that exact timestamp.
The command used was:
./protoc --plugin=protoc-gen-grpc-java=/Users/user/Downloads/protoc-gen-grpc-java-1.45.1-osx-x86_64.exe -I=src/main/resources/proto/zcash/ --java_out=src/main/java/ --grpc-java_out=src/main/java/ src/main/resources/proto/zcash/service.proto
Then repeat, replacing service.proto with compact_formats.proto and darkside.proto
Darkside isn't needed for mainnet functionality, but included for completeness, and might be useful for testing.
