Welcome to the October 2019 newsletter. It’s been a busy few weeks and the network just completed a hard-fork to Spectrecoin v4 on 27th September 2019 and all went according to plan. We did not experience any issues and all the exchanges have also upgraded to v4. The Spectrecoin Foundation CIC is now in a much better position with regards to funding and we can continue development into the future. A new developer joined the team, @Tom14 (Discord tag), who is working on upgrading the TOR integration and other issues. Read on and find out what is happening and what is coming up. The newsletter might feel a bit short, but there will be a full upgrade guide to v4.1 out soon that will explain in more detail about mnemonic seed wallets.

New developer joins the team

We have a new developer, @Tom14, who has agreed to join the team and will be working alongside @Tek and @Helix to continually improve the software. He will be working for at least 6 months committing to at least 20 hours per week. @Tom14 is particularly familiar with TOR and has almost completed the upgrade to TOR v3 for Spectrecoin. You will see more of him in the next few weeks and months. Give him a warm welcome to the Spectrecoin team.

My name is Léo Lehmann, I live in France and I’m currently in my last year of IT Engineering, specialised in Cybersecurity. I’m very familiar with privacy tools like Tor and other anonymization layers, and with Single Board Computers that I used a lot for developing. I’m passionate about the privacy subject, which is also strongly related to security, and I’m endlessly searching for new ways to take back the online privacy that has been taken from us. I don’t really know what to say regarding my experience, as I’ve been mostly working on an entrepreneurial side project that is an IoT device for security and privacy, which components and code will be open source.

Léo Lehmann (Spectrecoin Developer)

Mnemonic backup

Spectrecoin v4.1 is almost ready for release. The new v4.1 comes with a significant security upgrade in the form of so called ‘mnemonic seed` recovery of your wallet. That means that you only need a sequence of 24 words to recover all your coins and all your transactions in case of disaster. It is also possible to use a so called ‘extension word‘ to further increase the safety of your coins. We will issue an upgrade guide on how to move from your old wallet to a ‘mnemonic seed‘ wallet once we release v4.1. This not only makes your coins much safer and easier to backup but also opens up for hardware wallet integration. @Tom14 and @Helix are currently looking into both Ledger and Trezor integration. Below are some screenshots to show you what it looks like when you run the software for the first time with v.4.1. We will publish a full upgrade guide on how to move from the old ‘wallet.dat’ to the new mnemonic version. The guide will be released along side the release v4.1.

Development Update

@Helix (Yves) did some interesting searches around GitHub activity and compared the Spectrecoin dev team with some other well known projects. This clearly shows how busy our small team really is. Have a look at the following data from GitHub. (Searches done in grey). This shows the total amount of committers since day one of the projects.

Amount of committers:
{ spectre } develop » git shortlog -s -n --all --no-merges | wc -l
17

Some entries are duplicates because of different email addresses. With this streamlined, we got an overall of 14 committers. So here’s the amount of committers with more than 10 commits:

{ spectre } develop » git shortlog -s -n --all --no-merges
594  teknex
503  HLXEasy
166  Jansen Garrick
81  Shbli
34  Helix
22  Heidi Kaulitz
15  Ahmed Shbli
10  Helix Easy

There are only three with more than 100 commits. As a comparison here are the amount of committers on Bitcoin and Monero:

{ bitcoin } master » git shortlog -s -n --all --no-merges | wc -l
817
{ monero } master » git shortlog -s -n --all --no-merges | wc -l
298

And the top five committers regarding their amount of commits:

{ bitcoin } master » git shortlog -s -n --all --no-merges | head -n 5
2070  Wladimir J. van der Laan
1298  Pieter Wuille
975  MarcoFalke
731  Matt Corallo
701  Philip Kaufmann

{ monero } master » git shortlog -s -n --all --no-merges | head -n 5
2864  moneromooo-monero
389  Riccardo Spagni
231  stoffu
197  Howard Chu
167  warptangent

As we’re sometimes compared to them, we just made it visible what the manpower in the background is. So, Monero looks at some point like some kind of a one-man show in regard to the amount of commits at the 1st and 2nd position. And in comparison to the simple amount of commits, the amount of committers in general and the time since our start, we’re very active!

The pure comparison of the commit amount is of course kind of blurry, especially as commits can be squashed during approval of pull requests. But they simply make projects activity on the code base visible.

Legal

The Spectrecoin Foundation CIC has signed up as a client with a well known London based law firm to get clarity around our legal and regulatory responsibilities. We feel that we need to obtain some proper legal advice to stay ahead of the game and be prepared for whatever regulations come our way. We expect a legal report w/ various recommendations in the next week or so and we will publish a summary in the next newsletter.

Foundation Wallets

In the interest of transparency, these are the current Spectrecoin Foundation wallets. We have moved the ‘Community Chest‘, ‘Reserve Fund‘ and the ‘Main Fund‘ over to v4.1 mnemonic seed wallets for better security. We are currently staking 300,000 XSPEC in the ‘Community Chest‘ wallet and we will transfer the stake rewards to the Panda bot for giveaways every Monday.

‘Community Chest’ (SXyeoFjmc3U9VxUNrn3pExHqCiRUMMxkHY)
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/xspec/address.dws?SXyeoFjmc3U9VxUNrn3pExHqCiRUMMxkHY.htm

‘Reserve Fund’ (SkU8DDgJwgKXpjkbpwuxJK8LkMZLr7XEvs)
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/xspec/address.dws?SkU8DDgJwgKXpjkbpwuxJK8LkMZLr7XEvs.htm

‘Foundation Main Fund’ (Sh8oo3Ukw1tvuNRzeERRhsLjeYPkHWM8i1)
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/xspec/address.dws?Sh8oo3Ukw1tvuNRzeERRhsLjeYPkHWM8i1.htm

We still have very little constructive community engagement and we remind everyone that there are funds available for genuine proposals and ideas. Please either fill in the form to submit a proposal or if you have something that doesn’t fit the form, please talk to us on Discord.

Links

Website: https://spectreproject.io/
GitHub: https://github.com/spectrecoin/spectre
Block explorer (v4): https://chainz.cryptoid.info/xspec/
Testnet explorer (v4): https://chainz.cryptoid.info/xspec-test/
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/spectrecoin/
Crex24: https://crex24.com/exchange/XSPEC-BTC
Livecoin: https://www.livecoin.net/en/trading/XSPEC_BTC
Altilly: https://www.altilly.com/market/XSPEC_BTC
Citex: https://www.citex.co.kr/#/trade/XSPEC_BTC
Txbit (SPECTRE): https://txbit.io/Trade/XSPEC/BTC
Discord: https://discord.gg/ckkrb8m
Twitter (official): https://twitter.com/Spectrecoin
Twitter (official): https://twitter.com/XspecRising
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4434053.0
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/XSPEC/
Telegram: https://t.me/spectrecoin
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spectrecoin/