A word from Bastijn, developer of G-Dash:

When the PoW2 whitepaper was released and the witness functionality was described, I started thinking about a way to have a wallet running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and combining it with the option of running a full node to strengthen the network. Leaving a computer running with the wallet software day and night is a waste of energy (and costs) and renting a server for this purpose would be a bit overkill as well. Hence I started experimenting on a headless Raspberry Pi (a mini-computer without a screen/mouse/keyboard). The board itself costs about 30 Euro, and with a case, SD card, etc it is still a cheap computer fully capable of running a Gulden node.

So, I got everything working on the Pi. My Gulden node had incoming connections. Cool! But every time I wanted to check the node, I had to log in to my Pi and type a few commands to eventually see a load of text and numbers on my screen. “I should make a web interface for this, so I don’t have to log in every time” was my thought. That said, I started a small project that gave me some simple output. However, this was still the same load of text and numbers.

I like dashboards and use it every day (like Google Analytics, the status of my servers at work, etc), so I started with a simple dashboard for Gulden on Linux. While creating the dashboard, I found more people from the Gulden community could benefit from this and the small project became a real project. I spoke with a few people who had a Pi collecting dust or some space left on their VPS/server and were happy to help testing the software and give their opinion to improve the software. So this project moved from a “5-minute quick and dirty” project, to an “actual project” to a “wow, 10 people are testing the software” project.

Now, the software is ready for a public beta release, where everyone can download the software and test it out before a full release (version 1) is ready. The beta is fully functional, but the witnessing part will be implemented when Gulden 2.0 (with POW2) is released. Until that time, I would love to hear any comments, suggestions and code improvements. But in the end I would love to see many new full nodes all around the world.

Last but not least, many thanks to the people who helped testing the software and who helped improving the usability and stability! Thank you slack users gamersea, paulwillen, restart, harmjan, optimal, rkatz, sanlorenz, coldstone, spasma, rockz, jaymaree.

Bastijn Koopmans

Download the G-Dash software now at: https://g-dash.nl

Or order a complete Pi with software pre-installed at Guldenstore.eu