Archived CoreDev-Liquid-May-July

[Liquid369]

Name: CoreDev-Liquid-May-July
Term: 3 Cycle
Cycle Amnt: 25,000
Total Amnt: 75,000
Author: Liquid369
Receiver: Liquid369
Address: D8KNw8umgQVCGkjxMEXJqfZsDih63PvZTq
Created: 04-28-2023
Status: Active
Vote Hash: f57eae4529ac5bad7faaeaa281556643d2ca3905ca87c52819a44a94c12b2d99

Liquid369 Proposal

This proposal is going to outline what has been done as an update to users and what will be continued in the next portions. It outlines some ideas for users and the responsibilities entailed overall.

Last Proposal Report

- Core DMN work has been verified and some portions are merged and others awaiting more review.
- Deterministic MN GUI co-authored with Alessandro
- LLMQ was co-authored and tested
- Updates to TOR and IPv6 are still in testing but are on a base level good
- BIP 174 Started, to explain this, it is an actually useful improvement to multi-sig because currently, keys need to be in a single wallet to use, which really isn't functional.
- New seeder for networking
- Patching a large networking bug affecting many coins
- Patching a memory leak
- Resource consumption minimizing
- GUI Fixes for proposals
- Rewind Block Index feature to rewind to most recent checkpoint vs resync

Pull Requests:

Pull requests · PIVX-Project/PIVX

Protected Instant Verified Transactions - Core wallet. - Pull requests · PIVX-Project/PIVX

github.com

Responsibilities:

- Maintaining PIVX Core and Repositories under PIVX-Project organization
- Coordinating between Core and Labs
- Reviewing and testing code submissions (organization rules is 2 approvals and reviews needed for anything to be merged from non-authors)
- Research and improve current code for optimizations
- Research and improve backports for our perpetual updating to BTC Core
- Maintain networking infrastructure and build some analytics
- Supporting Community/Exchanges/Services/DEX all in technical regards for PIVX
- Coordinating with Marketing to bring accurate technical representations and promotions for PIVX development
- Maintaining regtest network servers for testing and infrastructure for others to use in testing new features
- Making overall PIVX Core development updates

What is Next?

- Continuing to test and implement IPv6/TOR DMN's but to be clear, IPv6 is fine at this point most concerns are with the TOR Protocol. They are just grouped together at the moment.
- Continuing to backport BIP174 in a way that works for PIVX to benefit users, services and the DAO. Multisig being used with proposals, services and etc are necessary.
- Creating a GUI screen for BIP174 usage in a easy fashion (if we get to it in this timeframe)
- Analyzing chain data and expanding explorer API's or standardizing them for expansion of the core services and products
- Researching more Cryptographically to contribute and assess properly the improvements coming in Shield from Duddino and Alessandro
- Planning potential budget redesign or improvements based on evaluating the current budget flows

Proposed Roadmap Items

PIVX Roadmap Ideas (Old and New)

• Shield Staking Q2
• Staking Pools - Tenative
• Multi Sig Sporks - Tenative
• Governance Redesign - Tenative
• Quorum Rotation (needed for instant send safety) Q3/4
• Chainlocks Q2
• Web Payment Processors(Woo/Wordpress) Q3
• Extend ipv6/tor into Deterministic MN’s Q2/3
• New Ledger App Q3
• BTCPayServer Q4
• BIP 174 Partially Signed Transactions for better MultiSig Q2/3

Completing all roadmap items past the “Planning” stages

• Deterministic MN Lists Q2
• Long Living MN Quorums Q2
• DMN Proof Of Service Q2
• Tier 2 Networking Redesign Q2
• New Transaction Types Q2
• Legacy MN and DMN Compatibility Q2
• DMN Creation Wizard Q2
• Masternode UI/UX Changes for DMN (Needs update/revoke added to GUI) Q2
• MN List Caching/Updating Q2
• Quorum Signing Sessions Q2

Roadmap items are subject to change based on the needs and requirements of the team at the time. There can be things to redirect resources at times and just in general following the processes can also take time but these are estimates that should be achievable. Roadmap items are not included to me, but as the team is growing I am making sure to expand capacity to provide information to all users/community.

Voting

To vote yes:

mnbudgetvote many f57eae4529ac5bad7faaeaa281556643d2ca3905ca87c52819a44a94c12b2d99 yes

To vote no:

mnbudgetvote many f57eae4529ac5bad7faaeaa281556643d2ca3905ca87c52819a44a94c12b2d99 no

 

[Eric_Stanek]

Very well organized and very detailed. Thank you!

How does the Road Map section above, compare to what is on the PIVX.org website? Are you keeping the Road Map on PIVX.org in sync?

Would be great to know which items are, for example, for v5.5.1 (No protocol bump - not a mandatory upgrade) and which need to wait for v6.0 with a protocol bump.

 

[Liquid369]

Very well organized and very detailed. Thank you!

How does the Road Map section above, compare to what is on the PIVX.org website? Are you keeping the Road Map on PIVX.org in sync?

Would be great to know which items are, for example, for v5.5.1 (No protocol bump - not a mandatory upgrade) and which need to wait for v6.0 with a protocol bump.

To explain we are trying to continue things promised and we evaluated if it is worth it or not, so some have Tentative dates based on how other items go during the proposed Roadmap above.
We plan to keep the Site in sync with this Roadmap and some old items, we are getting to now making adjustments on the site where we can start addressing these. I do not have proposed versions currently because mainly we do not plan on making a release until 6.0 is "ready". Naturally, other things can come up over time that may make a cause for this, but items generally in Q3/Q4 can be considered for a 6.0.1 -> 6.1.0 based on how fast they get reviewed and merged.

Overall, we want to be careful with Protocol bumps in succession for the exchanges and services, we have been in constant contact with exchanges, and with Business Development skyrocketing we should focus on a 6.0.0 in late Q2/3 with a potential for 6.0.1 - 6.1.0 coming during Q3/Q4. Again many things can change with time but this is the overall consensus currently we have discussed. Some may have some input they may want to throw in for some extra details but this is the simpler explanation of it right now.

 

[CaptainRedBeard]

Hello everyone, I would like to share my observations regarding the proposal put forward. As someone who has experience in development, I feel compelled to speak up and express my concerns. Simply put, I believe that this proposal is fraudulent and I can no longer remain silent.

During the first cycle, Liquid369 received 30000 PIV for his work, which included five pull requests. However, upon examining the work done, I noticed that three of the PRs were quite trivial and lacked substance, while two others appeared to be copied from existing pull requests. For instance, the 'Solve BLS memleak' pull request had only seven lines of code copied from Dash. Similarly, the 'Rewind block index to last checkpoint' pull request seemed almost identical to one previously made by Furszy. The other two PRs were 'Rate limiting rumored address processing' and 'Clear EvoDB cache when oversized,' both of which were backports.

Upon reviewing the second cycle, I saw that the pattern continued with most of the PRs being backports or copies of existing work, with the notable exception of one 10-line code fix. Liquid369 also claimed to have co-authored work on Long Living Masternode Quorums, but I could not find any related commits. Furthermore, he did not work on Deterministic Masternode as he had claimed he would.
For the second cycle, the PRs were:

'Introduce interfaces Signing Provider/BaseSignatureCreator,' which was another copy-pasted Bitcoin backport
'Move transaction combining from signrawtransaction to new RPC,' which was another Bitcoin backport
'Do not fully sort all nodes for addr relay,' which was another Bitcoin backport
'Increase performance of Good,' which was also a Bitcoin backport
'[GUI] Fix ban actions in peer list,' which only consisted of 10 lines of code.

I find it difficult to justify the $24,000 payout he received. In my opinion, a more reasonable amount would be around $1,000. Most of his contributions consisted of copying and pasting existing pull requests, or making minor changes like adding a button or modifying a few lines of code. From what I can see, he did not bring any new ideas or significant contributions to the project.

In addition to these concerns, I discovered that while being paid as a Full Time PIVX Core Developer, Liquid369 also made 23 commits to Dogecash and released a new version https://github.com/dogecash/dogecash/releases/tag/5.5.1 https://github.com/dogecash/dogecash/commits/main. He purposefully hid these commits from his GitHub profile, making them difficult to find. Perhaps this is the reason his work on PIVX has been so shallow.

In conclusion, I have serious concerns about this proposal's validity, and I urge others, especially developers, to consider the quality of work produced before making any decisions.

 

[Alessandro Rezzi]

I have two questions, all the other devs (Kitty Duddino Fuzz and me) have been really clear about what they have done and a clear roadmap/plan on what they are going to do, so for example on:

- Researching more Cryptographically to contribute and assess properly the improvements coming in Shield from Duddino and Alessandro

Why are you including your name in shield improvements? (I guess you are talking about shield staking which is the only current shield improvement?) What cryptographically research are you doing? At the moment of writing you haven't written a single line of code on shield staking and you told me that you don't know cryptography.

Second question, you included the full roadmap but can you be more clear on which points you are going to work?

I have nothing against you of course, but at the same time I absolutely despise people that try to get funded with work of others.

 

[Liquid369]

I have two questions, all the other devs (Kitty Duddino Fuzz and me) have been really clear about what they have done and a clear roadmap/plan on what they are going to do, so for example on:


Why are you including your name in shield improvements? (I guess you are talking about shield staking which is the only current shield improvement?) What cryptographically research are you doing? At the moment of writing you haven't written a single line of code on shield staking and you told me that you don't know cryptography.

Second question, you included the full roadmap but can you be more clear on which points you are going to work?

I have nothing against you of course, but at the same time I absolutely despise people that try to get funded with work of others.

It is for me to research and improve to be able to do something more in that regard, it's not saying I am, so I can contribute to that, especially in the case of reviewing and the processes we go through. It's nothing to say that is what I am doing.
My initial proposal has information in it that this stuff is updating to, it does not specifically mean the entirety is work by myself. Its updates come from what I described in the first portions of my proposal, as it may sound off but we aren't giving updates here in that regard and people have asked for some other information. This includes a larger overview of the dev work for the entire group.

My specific tasks will be

• BTCPayServer
• BIP 174 Partially Signed Transactions for better MultiSig
• Web Payment Processors(Woo/Wordpress)
• Continuing Tor availability for DMN
• Governance evaluation because after we discussed you seemed iffy so I want to take that up
• Masternode UI/UX Changes for DMN

Whats next? more accurately describes what I declare to work on in this regard more so.
And you are asking about wanting to understand further the work being done in an area, not my strong suit, yet it's being expanded on in Core. I do not see it as a stretch because it was the same process for prior devs, if they had the time, I want to make said time. We even talked and you've provided information to help me continue that.

 

[Alessandro Rezzi]

It is for me to research and improve to be able to do something more in that regard, it's not saying I am, so I can contribute to that, especially in the case of reviewing and the processes we go through. It's nothing to say that is what I am doing.
My initial proposal has information in it that this stuff is updating to, it does not specifically mean the entirety is work by myself. Its updates come from what I described in the first portions of my proposal, as it may sound off but we aren't giving updates here in that regard and people have asked for some other information. This includes a larger overview of the dev work for the entire group.

My specific tasks will be

• BTCPayServer
• BIP 174 Partially Signed Transactions for better MultiSig
• Web Payment Processors(Woo/Wordpress)
• Continuing Tor availability for DMN
• Governance evaluation because after we discussed you seemed iffy so I want to take that up
• Masternode UI/UX Changes for DMN

Whats next? more accurately describes what I declare to work on in this regard more so.
And you are asking about wanting to understand further the work being done in an area, not my strong suit, yet it's being expanded on in Core. I do not see it as a stretch because it was the same process for prior devs, if they had the time, I want to make said time. We even talked and you've provided information to help me continue that.

Thanks for clarifications

 

[CaptainRedBeard]

I have noticed a gradual increase in the number of 'yes' votes. I am asking the rest of the Masternode owners to look at proposals objectively. Please ponder on these question before voting, and perhaps you will get an insight on why I decided to target this specific developer:

• What is PIVX losing, were this proposal not to pass?
• Is their work going to bring in new people to the project?
• Has the proposer fulfilled the promises made in previous proposals?
• Am I voting based on objective value, or simply because the proposer has been with us for a long time?

When evaluating developer proposals, please consider the following:

• What is the actual value of the developer's work, and does it justify the proposed payout?
• Has the developer provided any significant contributions to the project?
• Is the developer actively working on improving PIVX, or are they dividing their time between multiple projects?

This will be my final message on the matter, I had hoped for more participation in the discussion, particularly from other developers, to bring clarity to the unresolved points. Unfortunately, it seems that my messages are being ignored, and the discussion has not gained the momentum I had anticipated.

 

[Duddino]

Liquid, you are a nice person, but I don't think this is a very good proposal.
I'm sure it's not out of malice, but the whole proposal is way too general

Maintaining PIVX Core and Repositories under PIVX-Project organization

I thought this was @fuzzbawls' responsibility? Do you even have write access to the organization?

Patching a large networking bug affecting many coins

What does this even mean?
> Analyzing chain data and expanding explorer API's or standardizing them for expansion of the core services and products
Explain this a bit further as well
Am I correct in assuming that the "What is next" paragraph is the work you plan on doing on the next 3 cycles and the "Proposed Roadmap Items" is what the whole development team is going to work towards? If that's correct I don't think the latter belongs in a proposal where you're the only one getting funded.
I'm also a bit disappointed that you've made more commits on dogecash than PIVX

 

[Duddino]

I would also like to know what cryptographic research you're doing (You kinda avoided Alessandro's question)

 

[Liquid369]

- Maintaining PIVX Core and Repositories under PIVX-Project organization
This is just not a single-person task, it should be spread about and I am focusing on more things related to the core work which we have other repositories that still need to focus on them.

- Patching a large networking bug affecting many coins
This is vague intentionally because I did not think it needs to be broadcasted as to what’s exactly wrong and not fixed in the current release. Although the information is included in the corresponding pull request.

- Analyzing chain data and expanding explorer API's or standardizing them for expansion of the core services and products
Based on recent discussions and internal asks by Binance, I wanted to work on bringing some easily accessible endpoints that may be used to visualize data on the chain for ease of reporting/a more robust explorer.

- Am I correct in assuming that the "What is next" paragraph is the work you plan on doing on the next 3 cycles and the "Proposed Roadmap Items" is what the whole development team is going to work towards? If that's correct I don't think the latter belongs in a proposal where you're the only one getting funded.
It is only related to the work I would like to do in the next several months. Based on the way things go it should be do-able in some form.

- I'm also a bit disappointed that you've made more commits on DogeCash than PIVX
We have a process here and DogeCash is run by myself solely for the past few years. Nothing to hold it up, alongside it was fixing an issue that held the entire chain in limbo it *looks* more just based on GUI changes finalized at the same time.

- I would also like to know what cryptographic research you're doing (You kinda avoided Alessandro's question)
For the start, it’s mainly about math right now which is a bit above me. And to which I have asked for some help from Alessandro to be able to again contribute to the work ongoing. If you have other guidance I am absolutely looking for more.

 

[Gerrald]

I think this needs more discussion on. If devs who are getting paid the same pretty much are saying people are not pulling their weight it's going create a toxic environment.

I don't know how much work each coding bit takes, it's above my knowledge so maybe an open dev discussion and people who understand coding need to join in the discussion for each dev proposal.

 

[xoff]

This will be my final message on the matter, I had hoped for more participation in the discussion, particularly from other developers, to bring clarity to the unresolved points. Unfortunately, it seems that my messages are being ignored, and the discussion has not gained the momentum I had anticipated.

When I saw the original budget proposal for Feb-Apr I was very sceptical not least because of the large amount (90k PIV). All I could see at that time was a little (public) discussion regarding the DMN feature and that they familiarized with the work that was already done by the old dev team. In Discord I asked for more details on time/work and results that he will commit to but the answer I received was very disappoiting.
Now the three months have passed and I think my gut feeling was not wrong at that time. I don't see that he put out adequate results compared to his massive compensation. I also come to the conclusion that these proposals are fraudulent. But no one seems to care.

And it's just little points like putting the wrong total amount here in this proposal that are very shady...

 

[CaptainRedBeard]

What I find amusing is that despite having had the biggest Developer payout, in the last cycle he opened the staggering amount of 1 Pull Request consisting of 27 lines of code.
Now tell me why we should trust this individual to finish his tasks when, despite having had a significant amount of pressure, instead of giving his all to prove that we're all wrong, he just stops working entirely.

 

[xoff]

This matter is very worrying for me. It seems that this developer has enough influence to push these proposals through.
Just to remind you: He got 24k USD for the last three months and this proposal now brings him another 18k USD for the next three.
I am very much in favor of project members being paid appropriately. But based on the performance of the last three months, the new proposal is totally unacceptable.
The fact that he lets these accusations stand uncommented and gets away with it disturbs me greatly. And the fact that no one from the rest of the team is intervening makes me question the integrity of the entire project.

 

[Cryptosi]

Thankyou to all the developers who have chipped in with highly detailed and focused criticisms of this proposal. This is the power of both open source and DAOs. We do need to consider whats going to be the next steps that we take to keep everyone happy in future, there may be more to discuss here than the forums can handle. I will try to cover as much as I can in DAOWatch, but I'm out of my depth here with the technical nature of the critique.

 

[Alessandro Rezzi]

I wanted to wait for the end of the cycle of May before posting my opinion on this proposal:
As already stated on the Labs discord I think that the current core dev team has many problems and this is one of them. Last cycle Liquid received 30k PIVs and contributed with exactly 2 Pull requests:

[GUI] Add differentiation for Shielded Memos by Liquid369 · Pull Request #2865 · PIVX-Project/PIVX

This introduces a new TransactionRecord RecvWithShieldedAddressMemo and icon/image for the transaction. With the conversation in Issue #2786 , there is something we can do and that changes the icon...

github.com

[Core][Tests] Cleanup HTTPServer start and stop by Liquid369 · Pull Request #2867 · PIVX-Project/PIVX

Lately, we have been spending a lot of time messing with our test cases. We are hitting random errors at various points and it is causing us to waste time constantly fixing and re-running tests in ...

github.com

Those two contributions are just minor bug fix/enhancement and absolutely don't worth 15K PIVs (3930.0$) each. I don't know what other developers think of this but I expected much more .

Then there is a third contribution that if merged would just break masternodes and makes me question Liquid's dev skills

[Tests] [MN] Properly set Masternode Pings by Liquid369 · Pull Request #2869 · PIVX-Project/PIVX

IsPingedWithin is meant to check if the lastPing is null or if it is within the time slot for an update to lastPing. But we are not updating the map if lastPing was null initially. Logically the ch...

github.com

So considering the work of the last month this proposal is a big no for me and I hope we can find a better core developer (but again this is just my opinion and I don't decide this).
I did not want to make this comment but if things don't change we are not going far (at least in development).

To answer other comments:

And the fact that no one from the rest of the team is intervening makes me question the integrity of the entire project.

Most of the team is made by non developers so they probably cannot analyze the work done

In addition to these concerns, I discovered that while being paid as a Full Time PIVX Core Developer, Liquid369 also made 23 commits to Dogecash and released a new version...

I actually don't mind if a person works on more than one project as long as contributions here on PIVX are enough.

 

[Liquid369]

I wanted to wait for the end of the cycle of May before posting my opinion on this proposal:
As already stated on the Labs discord I think that the current core dev team has many problems and this is one of them. Last cycle Liquid received 30k PIVs and contributed with exactly 2 Pull requests:

[GUI] Add differentiation for Shielded Memos by Liquid369 · Pull Request #2865 · PIVX-Project/PIVX

This introduces a new TransactionRecord RecvWithShieldedAddressMemo and icon/image for the transaction. With the conversation in Issue #2786 , there is something we can do and that changes the icon...

github.com

[Core][Tests] Cleanup HTTPServer start and stop by Liquid369 · Pull Request #2867 · PIVX-Project/PIVX

Lately, we have been spending a lot of time messing with our test cases. We are hitting random errors at various points and it is causing us to waste time constantly fixing and re-running tests in ...

github.com

Those two contributions are just minor bug fix/enhancement and absolutely don't worth 15K PIVs (3930.0$) each. I don't know what other developers think of this but I expected much more .

Then there is a third contribution that if merged would just break masternodes and makes me question Liquid's dev skills

[Tests] [MN] Properly set Masternode Pings by Liquid369 · Pull Request #2869 · PIVX-Project/PIVX

IsPingedWithin is meant to check if the lastPing is null or if it is within the time slot for an update to lastPing. But we are not updating the map if lastPing was null initially. Logically the ch...

github.com

So considering the work of the last month this proposal is a big no for me and I hope we can find a better core developer (but again this is just my opinion and I don't decide this).
I did not want to make this comment but if things don't change we are not going far (at least in development).

To answer other comments:


Most of the team is made by non developers so they probably cannot analyze the work done


I actually don't mind if a person works on more than one project as long as contributions here on PIVX are enough.

I do find it interesting as a team we do not talk about things that are problematic. It's a great environment to work in.

Those pull requests are things also not proposed in my proposal, but where has my prior work for some of the items has it been reviewed? I can't move forward on some items until then.
Some of the items here are related to planning and moving other items forward, so until we can get others to help move items forward things for me get pushed back.
I have started work on items in my proposal such as:
- Analyzing chain data and expanding explorer API's or standardizing them for expansion of the core services and products
Which is being done in rust and deciding on a frontend framework. I may not be the fastest person indeed but things are being done.
We now have a rust library to poll PIVX RPC's

The third 'contribution' would be good if you just talked to me about it for adjusting it, people can be wrong.

I think a lot of issues are from peoples differing views on what should also be done or how to carry PIVX itself forward.

 

[Eric_Stanek]

I think everyone can agree, that 'measuring' effort based on a count of PRs is not fair at all. One PR may take 20 mins. Another may take 20 days.

Knowing this, it is quite disingenuous to imply 23 PRs for DogeCash is a huge amount of work. I dug into them, and found that they are almost, if not all, related to a graphics rebrand. That means they were likely trivial, and done very quickly with little effort.

What bothers me most, is that this is a symptom of poor communication among the team. It reminds me of when Furzy and RZ refused to keep Fuzz in the loop. That didn't work out well, and hurt everyone.

I would much rather see a large team of developers, with greatly different skill levels, helping each other grow to become the best they can be, than to see 'public jabs' like this. PIVX has 'been there - done that' before. Let's not go that route again please.

 

[Alessandro Rezzi]

Those pull requests are things also not proposed in my proposal, but where has my prior work for some of the items has it been reviewed? I can't move forward on some items until then.

Not proposed in your proposal but that 2 PRs has been literally all the core developer work you have done this last cycle

What bothers me most, is that this is a symptom of poor communication among the team. It reminds me of when Furzy and RZ refused to keep Fuzz in the loop. That didn't work out well, and hurt everyone.

I honestly don't see any communication issue, I would have said the same to any other dev (Duddino, Kitty, Bread...) if I considered their work not good enough (but I think they are all doing a very good job).