Bullion (CBX) rebranding to "bullion," 2018 roadmap published

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017 report!

Tying up loose ends and resolving nagging problems, as we are getting closer to Alpha testing...

The peer problem has been resolved; now the Vault 3.0 communicates perfectly with existing 2.4.3 Vaults - we have hit another stumbling block (!) with historic block 393, which is causing a problem to new Vault and we are addressing this before we can move on with the next step.


The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017 status report!

We are still finishing up with re-coding the opdocode interpreter to make sure new Vault 3.0 can accept the existing blockchain from previous protocols; and this should be complete by the end of this week. As mentioned earlier, it's a tedious task as we have to test every single line of new code as we go, and this part of the Vault code is about 1000 lines long.

I will revise the posted Roadmap to reflect this new challenge; basically we are still looking at new Vault delivered by the end of September, with associated hard fork taking place in October.


The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017 status report!

The opcode interpreter rewriting is now complete; now that we have changed many parameters, we need now to revisit how these subroutines are referenced and check each and every one of the opcode calls; this is one week of work, give or take. After this we will be attacking the GUI interface, to be followed by alpha-testing and subsequent required debugging.

The CBX community members who would like to participate in the alpha-testing of the new Vault (under strict non-disclosure rules), please contact me. Naturally, alpha testing simulations will not have any impact on existing CBX balances.

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017 status report!

As we know already, the opcode interpreter rewriting is complete; all internal calls to this new opcode interpreter have been rechecked and modified when necessary.

We are moving forward, because now I am happy to report that we are at the stage where we are running the Vault 3.0 live and attempting to make it synchronise organically from scratch from the online 2.4.3 Vaults (syncing right from the start, CBX genesis block) - naturally the first attempt to sync did not work, so we made adjustments and, so far so good with second attempt, as this is ongoing as I write these lines. Remember that Vault 2.4.3 could never sync alone without bootstrap - so this will be an important improvement.

What is left to do after this is to finalize the GUI interface; but alpha testing can begin even with an incomplete GUI. Thank you for all volunteers who offered to run the testnet of Vault 3.0 with us, we will contact you shortly, should be next week or the week after for the final live testnet. This test will be the perfect opportunity for constructive criticism, and the perfect time to customize the Vault to how we want it - so we are still open for more testers, if more want to join.

Thank you all for your faith in our project, going through and rewriting thousands of lines of code is a tremendous task, as one can imagine.

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Hello family Crypto Bullion

Secondary projects are still being developed to improve our CBX.

Not only do we the team improve the currency, the community as well.

* Binary Options

* Stock Market Tournament

* Phone recharging solutions

* Investment platform

* Etc.

Participants to the CBX contest are working hard still to finish up their projects involving CBX, before the October 15th deadline so they have a chance to earn the 500$!

We are happy to remain part of this second stage for CBX.

Thanks for your comprehension...

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Hey Bullionaires, Join The Creative CBX Contest for Positive Momentum!

$500 reward for finding uses for CBX, in new sites and applications, paid by the CBX team.

Rules:

Any site or app using CBX for the first time is eligible to win
Post your site or app on the CBX forum. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=951753
The community will vote on a winner on Sept 1, 2017
Site or App must be available to the public and be working/running by Sept 1, 2017
$500 paid in BTC at the end

Examples of entries:

Existing sites that accept CBX for the first time
New CBX apps
New sites that use CBX
CBX YouTube videos or ads that can be shared

Feel free to post works in progress, status updates on your project, etc. on the CBX forum. The more you post on the CBX forum the more the community can get behind you and help make your project a success. Prize awarded in BTC so that the winner can buy more CBX!

**Bonus contest - every tweet or post using #500USDforCBX is an entry to win $100 worth of CBX. Winner chosen at random so the more you tweet, retweet, or post, the higher chances you have of winning.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

3 more days until we take the entries we have and submit to the jury (dev team and event sponsor)

has everybody submitted their up and running CBX project for the Creative CBX Contest?


The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

CBX Creative Contest Deadline!

Hello fellow Bullionnaires

As we had agreed, October 15th was the final day to send in your CBX project for this contest.

We have three entries to this contest:

CBX Bet http://cbx.bet/
Crypto Services https://cryptoservices.net/en/
Mycoinsbot https://mycoinsbot.com/

If I forgot anybody, please kindly remind me of your CBX project; these entries will be sent to jury and private sponsor for evaluation.

There can only be one contest winner, result will be communicated shortly; however keep in mind that when adding services to CBX economy, we all win!

Congradulations, and good luck!

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017 status report!

It's been too long since we published a development update and the reason for this has been that we stumbled upon an unforeseeable problem and realized we needed a new approach to allow this project to go forward in a timely fashion while not impacting on value.

What changes now is that we have decided not to let the new code be burdened by the existing old blockchain by attempting to make the new code accomodate it; this means that a CBX swap will be necessary, from old CBX to the new CBX currency instead of the simple seamless install of Vault 3.0 we had in mind. We still envision an elegant migration process: a snapshot of all existing CBX address balances will be taken, and then applied to the new CBX blockchain.

To regular users, the new Vault 3.0 will be able, upon first launch, to fetch the user's private keys which are in the old wallet.dat, and then from these old keys fetch his new CBX coin into the new blockchain. May I remind people that the CBX address' values will not be affected in any way by this swap, all balances stay the same.

The last hurdle we will find prior to alpha testing lies in the mandatory global money supply limitation of 250 000 CBX that can be associated to BPNs (masternodes) at any time. To address this, an innovative solution was proposed, applying a mutex; this solution is unheard of in the Crypto world and we think it will give good results.

Thank you for your patience and continued support

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017 status report!

Thanks to our new coding approach that we have outlined at the last post, we are seeing positive results in developing Vault 3.0.

We will be conducting Vault core tests this week-end and into next week, and unless we encounter a problem, public alpha testing may start as soon as the end of next week.

Happy weekend!

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017 status report!

An important part of the anonymity provided by the upcoming BPNs, will be derived from existing code from the Zerocoin protocol http://zerocoin.org/.

It has come to our attention, however, that the Zerocoin code we were using is vulnerable to a certain specific type of exploit, so a patch needs to be added and verified.


https://www.reddit.com/r/zcoin/comments/7bjw8f/zcoin_hardfork_and_security_update_version_01331/
https://forum.pivx.org/t/update-on-recent-zerocoin-protocol-exploit-patch-information/2753

While this thing is slowing us down, the bright side of it is that now is the perfect time to come across problems of that nature, when Vault 3.0 is not yet deployed. We will keep you informed on how this goes, still with a short term goal of initiating the alpha-testing phase.

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

End of sparktokens ICO CBX refund period

I have been notified that there are still some Quintessence ICO investors who have not claimed yet their CBX contribution back from the ICO. While what is left is only a small percentage of the total ICO contribution, we don't want to make people who want their CBX to lose it. There was ample time for contributors to answer back to the email which was sent to all and claim their CBX but this claim period will now close in 30 days, starting today. After this 30 day period is over, it will not be possible to claim ICO CBX and the leftover CBX from the ICO shall be transfered to Foundation and used for development and bounties. To make a claim now, the best way is to reply to the official email which was sent to you (none bounced back) using that same address which was entered in the ICO program; otherwise please write to me by PM, here in Bitcointalk, and please provide your email address that you had given at ICO time and we will proceed to verify your credentials.


The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017 status report!

I have to report that things are looking pretty good right now; the implementation of mutex, which was one of the very innovative approaches to Vault 3 and masternodes is a success so far. Also, the patch from Zerocoin which was reported the last time as a fix to a wekness will be implemented using the github merge procedure, so it is no longer an issue.

We also had an issue with block timing, which has been corrected just today; we are currently testing internally the latest daemon to make sure it is running smoothly - last time it was with this testing that we isolated certain problems that we are correcting now.

Another team is working on the GUI interface (the "qt"), and putting together the new visuals for CBXi: no longer gold, we are turning to a "platinum" look - but shhhhh. I will let you discover the rest when the Vault 3.0.0 rolls out.

Still no final date for the alpha testing phase, but it's coming...

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017 status report!


We have been discussing with Cryptopia for some time now, about the upcoming CBXi swap: long story short, there is good news and there is bad news. Let's start with the good news.

A few people had brought up the risk of CBX getting delisted from Cryptopia because of our development of Vault 3.0, and the good news is we will stay at Cryptopia even after Vault 3.0 is officially introduced.

CBX has always been well served by Cryptopia and thanks to the latest crypto world developments and good management, the exchange Cryptopia is moving up, becoming gradually more important and influential.

Now the bad news is, to stay at Cryptopia, Vault 3.0.0 cannot be a coin swap.


What this means is, we need to go back to our initial and time-consuming approach of keeping the old CBX blockchain into Vault 3.0, and not be creating a new ticker or a new coin (it's not going to be CBXi).

Essentially, the 2017-2018 roadmap stays the same: new look, new Vault 3.0, masternodes, PoSP, anonymity with zerocoin algo, etc... Just we can't make Vault 3.0 be a swap. Therefore, although we are not losing the work previously done, we need to find the way to make the new Vault 3.0 be able to understand and continue the historic CBX blockchain. It's going to take more time to do this, hopefully not too much time; and we feel the additional time required is worth the strategic advantage of staying on a good and valuable exchange like Cryptopia.

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017-2018 status report!

Coding a complex masternode coin such as what CBX will be, while meeting some "outside requirements" is never an easy thing.

Things are once again looking a lot better now than at the last post, however. The hashing issues we were having while wanting to keep the old blockchain were fourfold: to say it in crypto programming terms, they were: transaction offset problem, stake modifier problem, time spacing problem and checkpoint problem. I am being told that these 4 issues have now been addressed, and undergoing testing as we speak. Looks like we will be able to keep the old blockchain going, and, more importantly, it's not going to cost us too much precious time.

I would like to welcome malafaya to the coding team. While very experienced outside crypto and a longtime fan of Crypto Bullion, malafaya is a programmer who wanted to know more about the intrincasies of crypo coding. He has accepted to give us a hand with this project, and his contribution can be felt significantly already. Alex4J will continue to be the main coding developer of the Crypto Bullion project.

Good luck with this challenge, malafaya!

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Has anyone noticed what just appeared at the CBX block explorer today?

As announced earlier, we have found the culprit in the hashing problem and have been able to fully sync the new codebase Vault 3.0.0 (without any help, without a bootstrap), and run it side by side with the other Crypto Bullion nodes on the network; this part of the job is finally a done deal!

I know I have been promising an alpha test release for the longuest time so indeed we will have something we need to have you try out soon - what we need to test at different locations is making sure this new codebase will sync without any issues everywhere.

What is technically left to do until we Vault 3.0.0 is complete? Windows compilation, support for PoW miner (for testnet only!), create a file to manage the map of block mutex, addition, suppression, check, etc...;
Migrate current codebase to Zerocoin, pictures update, implement a better startup system for masternodes, implement a Qt Wallet launcher, add the hardfork logic in the code, add a customizable message in the Qt wallet.
On protocol switch (hardfork) activation, change VerifyScript2 to VerifyScript.

Things are definitely moving, but we are not finished yet; most importantly, we did not lose too much time with the hashing issue.

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017-2018 status report!


Latest progresses include the following:

- we added the Bootstrap loading tool directly in a Vault menu; also we provided a default-checked option that automatically download the bootstrap upon launching Vault 3 for the first time was added to the installer.

- masternode operations are being tested internally, making sure that no more than 125 BPN's can operate at any time, done through "mutex",

- we are applying final touches to dialog text strings in 4 languages,

- most of the development work is carried out in Linux environment, we still have to succesfully compile the new codebase Vault in Windows/MacOs environments; this is an important next step.

No new major problems have been encountered yet with new codebase, you will see Vault 3.0.0 pop on and off at the blockexplorer as we are testing each new feature.


The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017-2018 status report!

Development of Vault 3.0.0 is back on track, after the expected slow-down caused by the Christmas period holidays. Three points today:

We are now testing the staking capability, with a live test on the actual CBX blockchain; just a question of time before our Vault 3.0.0 generates a block so we can establish that everything worked as expected. This testing is important and will go on for a few more days.

Secondly, we are cleaning up the expected RPC functions, so that all RPC calls to Vault 3.0.0 daemon will respond exactly like for Vault 2.4.3. Also, a few functions of the CBX console were buggy so we are cleaning that up too.

Third, from a few days staking experience, we now can tell more precisely that the Vault actually needs 1.1 gig of RAM to run when staking; the important thing is that this amount of RAM is now stable.

And that's what we have, for now.


The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2017-2018 status report!

Development of Vault 3.0.0 continues, as promised, and as I am always in touch with Cryptopia and our coding team here are the latest developments:

1) After discussing with a few officers from Cryptopia and confirming with them that CBX Vault 3 will not be a swap, we have now 99.5% chance of implementing our desired name change with new logo. I still did not get the final OK however, as we all know Cryptopia's responsiveness has suffered greatly recently. I know my way around with Cryptopia to get things done, just right now they are really swamped.

2) In the previous update, I revealed that we were testing the staking capability of Vault 3; in this test we hit a bug however, our new codebase Vault 3 is somehow infringing one or more rules when attempting to form new blocks, and existing Vault 2.4.3s are rejecting blocks generated by Vault 3. We are conducting extensive tests to find out what rules are being infringed and how to solve this issue.

3) We were able to successfully compile the new Vault 3 code for Windows OS, so this is a major step.

4) Current Vault 2.4.3's loading time has been greatly reduced in Vault 3, using the fastindex function instead of making the Vault extensively recheck things that were checked already, on every launch. Vault 3 launches in under 1 minute now, close to 15 seconds on a SSD drive.

That's it for now, enjoy the rest of the week!

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2018 status report!

Hello everyone, I hope winter is going smoothly for all folks from the Northern Hemisphere, and as for the other side of the globe, enjoy your summer at its best! Have you noticed, everytime I post a Roadmap update, I have some really good news, then also something disappointing. I swear I am not doing this on purpose! It's just how life goes in development and coding - certain things go better than expected, then some things which appear trivial at first glance end up being a complicated puzzle.

So here we are, as of today:

1) The staking roadblock is cleared - after removing the whole staking algo and putting in our new PoSP code, we have successfully staked a bunch of blocks with new codebase directly in live CBX blockchain; those who wish to see Vault 3 currently in action can check out this address https://chainz.cryptoid.info/cbx/address.dws?5j8tTMcYEpKEThNpYyY1CXjN9aVKzwTd5X.htm As a hidden treat, Vault 3 was able to embed some text in its first succesful stake ever, for posterity: https://chainz.cryptoid.info/cbx/tx.dws?3484354.htm (Click on Raw Transaction)

2) With this achievement in mind, within 2 weeks, we will now be able to finally wrap things up and deliver a functional Vault 3.0.0 alpha; the good news with this version is many current bugs of Vault 2.4.3 will be fixed - so Vault 3 alpha will have all features of current Vault 2.4.3 (minus the bugs) however it will still not contain any code for BPNs yet. This Vault will have the new visual elements and use the new name, "Bullion".

3) About BPNs, which will be our interpretation of masternodes; things are moving ahead BUT as we are clarifying our own unique goals (emphasis on unique), we have come to realize that we have to recode everything. Our masternode system cannot be a simple copy-paste from other projects for a few reasons - one important reason is our concept of "queue" which does not exist anywhere else with PoS.

When someone signs up his 2000 CBX for a masternode, he enters a queue to become a BPN. If there are less than 125 BPNs active, his BPN becomes active quickly and starts to earn - if there are more than 125 BPNs, then the inactive BPN goes in a queue and does not earn until one of the 125 disconnects and frees up a spot.

4) New name, new logo: we need a new, more modern Bullion website! So we have purchased a new domain name, and work has started on the design of the new webpage. gatonegro97 has expressed his interest in helping us with this, and his experience in programming will be useful to create something original. Naturally we will put in all useful links on this page; if you have a special idea for this new website, please mention it here.

Welcome to gatonegro97 to the team for this project, and hopefully many more after that!

The Crypto Bullion Team

 

[pedrillo0]

Roadmap 2018 status report!

Good morning fellow Bullionaires; here is a significant step towards the new CBX network, as we had imagined it a while back.

The link to the new codebase Vault 3.0.0 alpha2 is the following: http://node.alex4j.cryptobullion.io/v30/bullion-qt.exe

Important notice: we have been testing internally this new software for two weeks and have not encountered any major issues that would have led us to lose CBX coin, but before you go ahead and use it with your own CBX address it would be important that you backup your wallet.dat file; if you are unsure how to backup that file, please ask. Wallet.dat files should be backed up periodically with all coins, in any case.

This public alpha test is the occasion to try out the new codebase and give us feedback, if you see anything that could be improved. You may occasionally find references to non-implemented features in the software, we will correct this as we go.

One major thing we have to warn people about this new codebase is that the new Vault is now able to sync organically, which no Vault has been able to do for some time now; syncing organically takes some time however, so this new Vault has an auto-bootstrap feature to speed up this process. The auto-bootstrap feature still has issues with Windows: we are aware of this problem and will be fixed shortly. Since we still have to apply a bootstrap manually if you don't want to sync organically, here is the link to current updated bootstrap: http://node.alex4j.cryptobullion.io/v30/bootstrap.zip.

This new codebase Vault software is a major step towards our planned roadmap as outlined in the OP of this thread, it does not yet however have the BPN (or masternode) capability. We are still working on our unique approach for CBX masternodes and will have a better idea regarding timing of this development next week.

We are also using this new Vault opportunity to gradually modernize/rebrand our image; you will already be able to see the new name and logo for CBX in this new Vault. Has anyone noticed that Cryptopia has changed "Crypto Bullion" to the new "Bullion" name already?



The Crypto Bullion Team