Regarding this post:
Hi Cassie. I would like to ask you a few questions on behalf of everyone. These are questions that everyone is very concerned about.
- Is the development team composed solely of Cassie, or are there multiple people working on different tasks?
- How many people are currently helping you with testing? Were they selected from the miners?
- The last question that everyone cares about: Can you provide a relatively accurate launch date? Will it be within August or by Christmas, so that miners can plan their electricity usage and mining equipment accordingly? Everyone hopes to arrange their resources properly.
- The answer right now is: kinda. I suspect this is more of a “why is this update to 2.0 taking so long, are you doing everything yourself?” question and so I will address this question from what I know: Mostly, yes. There are other people who have worked on tasks here and there, but nobody spends time developing this project like Cassie does. That said, I’ve been spending more time on this project and am finishing my first PR for an automated/scripted testnet setup (to help developers and future maintainers set up test nodes on their local computers)-- I want leverage the knowledge from building that to then help create my node management app. Perhaps pick up some smaller tasks from Cassie along the way. And at some point, my goal is to be able to contribute with the cryptography domain of the project.
- Pretty much all the bootstrap operator are helping by running their bootstrap using the 2.0 bootstrap code (which is why 1.4.21.1 only has 1 right now) so Cassie can run her tests on that. The level of precision that is needed for not only administering tests, but monitoring and knowing what the results mean (and if fixes are needed, being able to pinpoint fixes, if needed) is not really something that anybody outside Cassie can do at this point.
- Maybe Cassie can provide a more exact date, but from my experience as a software developer the answer is, especially when it comes to a project this complex: not really. Software projects typically have a plan, estimates, and a hope that you can get everything aligned and nothing too big surprises you, but often is as not, there is always a delay that pushes the timeline out to one degree or another (depending on the level of complexity of the surprises/changes that pop up). I would guess within a week from here, and would seem reasonable to me-- if it is taking longer than that I’d assume there was some massive finding and we’d all know about it.
As for my thoughts on this planning for mining costs, and this goes to all miners in general:
- Do not invest more than can be afforded, and don’t sell 3rd born children to keep a Quil miner running.
- mining Quil, from an investment standpoint (not a technical one) is not unlike buying a token on any other network, the difference being that an investment is made to gain tokens over time as long as the node is actively and fairly participating.
- If a miner decides to leverage themselves because they believe in the project (or that their mining will be rewarded), they should recognize the risks that the timeline generally doesn’t care about their needs or desires, it will move on it’s own pace and the miners need to adapt (unless the miners are also maintaining/building the project as well).
- There is no shame or real downside to just stopping node(s) while a miner waits for token release. If a miner runs out of runway, they need to recognize it for what it is: they’ve reached their limit of investment without the sale of tokens.
- A miner realizing that they can hold the tokens and use outside money to run the miners can be a powerful tool. In fact, I would say that it’s a better operation to to not be forced into selling tokens to pay their next bill.
- It’s not a good idea to count chickens before they hatch, even if they seem sure. And if something has a fairly high likelihood, a miner should recognize, still, that not everything may go how they want it and should adapt coping strategies for when it doesn’t.
- Yes, the project may have been delayed, but really, it’s only been a week and we’ve seen progress and fairly regular updates. Long-term, a miner should expect that release dates are in all reality estimated deadlines. There shouldn’t be serious deviation without good reason, but some level of flexibility will be needed.
- A person isn’t changing anything by persistently asking “When?” because the answer to that is, “when Cassie is good and ready.” Despite the non-specific answer, it’s the closest thing to an exact answer.
- Quil & Chill is a good meme, but one I’ve kinda come to like.