Finally! After a long wait and even more patience we can finally install Gulden 2.0.

Before you start, read along first.

For whom is the update?

The update is only required for desktop wallets. So people with a mobile wallet on their smartphone don’t have to do anything.

Completely quit the Gulden Desktop application and then download the new version from Gulden.com. Install the new version. You may be asked to install the new files over the old ones, and that’s fine. Start up the Gulden app and you’re done. Welcome to Gulden 2.0. There will be not a lot off changes right away, because the update activates itself in steps, where the miners are at play now first.

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Following is an announcement from the Gulden Development Team:

When should I upgrade?

After extensive development the Gulden team is excited to announce the release of 2.0.0, the first release of many in our 2.0 product line which will see frequent updates going forward.

As mentioned in our previous development update which can be reviewed here Gulden.com/segsig, there is an automated 5 phase process that needs to take place. Witnessing itself will activate in phase 3, approximately two weeks from now.

In this version it’s possible to create a witness account but not yet fund it, this will be possible in phase 2 for which a new version (2.0.1) will be released within the next 2 weeks.

Power Users and enthusiasts who want to experience witnessing in action on our testnet environment should sign up to the Gulden slack and join the #testnet channel.

Miners need to update as soon as possible, exchanges do not need to update until we are ready for phase 3 activation and should contact us if they need more information.

WHAT IS INCLUDED IN THE 2.0 RELEASE?

PoW²
On the 18th May 2017 the white paper for PoW² was made available on dev.gulden.com/pow2 for the public to review. Including the main advantages PoW² is bringing for Gulden.

SegSig
Advantages of Segregated Signature – The 58% factor:
1. 58% space saving on all transactions.
2. 58% increased transaction throughput. No block size or frequency changes needed.
3. Combined with our planned project Epoch, users will be able to run Gulden nodes on the most modest hardware well into the future.
4. Overhaul to the transaction script system which allowed us to implement PoW² and SegSig as clean as possible along with other benefits.

Post the 2.0 update a technical write up of SegSig will be made available in the release notes.

Sonic
With the Gulden blockchain growing constantly, it resulted in the initial synchronization of our desktop wallets taking longer over time. We decided to advance Sonic development to be included in the 2.0 release.

All tests have shown an above 66% improvement in sync times across all operating systems. Speed matters and more updates will be made to further improve the sync process.

Release notes: Github.com/Gulden/gulden-official/releases/tag/v2.0.0.0

SUPPORT AND TESTING

We thought this would be the appropriate time to thank our community involved in Support and Testing who provide incredible value in making sure user queries are dealt with as effectively and timely as possible. Our bug hunters going all out on the 2.0 testing to make certain we deliver a smooth update on release.

The following members of the community deserve a special mention for going above and beyond expectations. The passion and care they have shown in their respective roles in support and or testing has made a positive impact on Gulden as a whole.

Aat de Kwaasteniet, Matthias Bentein, Harm Jan van Kammen, Jeroen Bakker, Vincent van der Kroef, Martin Kollaard, Bart Hulshof, Bastijn Koopmans, Jeroen Aarden, Nick Toet, Onno Geenen.

THE FUTURE

Unity
Some say Unity is strength and more than 50% of our community agreed when they decided on Unity as our next project in our March 2018 vote.
The 4 projects added to our roadmap that was put up for vote can be reviewed here https://dev.gulden.com/whats-next/ . The other 3 projects Alias, Nomad and Epoch development order will be decided by the team and made public shortly after.

PoW² II
This project is a continuation from PoW² and will be worked on in tandem with Unity.

The main feature of PoW² II is to have safe zero confirm instant transactions. It will be revealed in the PoW² II portion of the white paper how this implementation will be achieved.

The project itself, while complex, will not require the same amount of development time as 2.0 which had over 40000 lines of code changes and 3 projects combined into 1.

Team Growth
In 2018 we added 2 full time developers to the team, 1 for iOS and another for core development. Both developers are highly skilled and compliment the skills matrix needed to accomplish the goals we have in place for Gulden.

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Gulden 2.0 will be a phased roll out.

Phase 1 – Gulden 2.0 will be released, it will function exactly like an upgraded 1.6 at this point with no PoW² functionality present yet. Upgraded miners will signal for an upgrade, when 75% of miners are signalling the software will activate phase 2.
(Expected to last at most a week or two – depending on miners)

Phase 2 – A new special backwards compatible transaction script type will become available to upgraded (2.0) users which will allow them to create witnessing addresses. Old (1.6) users will verify these scripts but won’t be able to create or use them.
Once a minimum threshold is reached (200 or more witnessing accounts with a combined weight of 20 million or more) we will enter Phase 3.
(Expected to last at most a week or two – depending on coin holders)

Phase 3 – PoW² witnessing commences, with a few limitations that allow old (1.6) users to remain on the network (no transactions allowed yet in the witness portion of the block for instance). Witnesses and miners will automatically start signalling a percentage of how many upgraded users they are seeing, when this percentage goes over an average of 95% for a fixed time period we will enter Phase 4.
(We anticipate that this may take several months)

Phase 4 – At this point our backwards incompatible changes trigger, new transaction format/rules activate, PoW² witnesses start to include transactions in their portion of the block, witness accounts start to switch over to a new improved backwards incompatible transaction format, new accounts using the old temporary format are no longer allowed, SegSig activates etc. The remaining 5% of 1.6.x users will no longer be able to participate in the network.

Phase 5 – After some time 2.1 will be released, code to support old witness accounts can/will be safely removed with affecting block validation – leaving us with a codebase free of technical debt. Checkpointing can also be safely removed at this point.

An enormous Project

The Gulden 2.0 update has been a huge undertaking. At first the update was expected to be a ‘simple’ pow2 update, but the development team soon found out that it was much more efficient to do SegSig too, thus avoiding coding and testing twice, saving a lot of work. Later Sonic was added, a project that had been on the roadmap for some time. Finally they cleaned and removed entire parts of the old bitcoin code, so that one can now speak of a real proprietary Gulden blockchain. Revolutionary safe, fast and with nice, user-friendly apps.

Welcome to Gulden!

Raspberry Pi Users

For the Raspbian users. Bastijn of G-Dash will try to release the Gulden 2.0 update tomorrow (and otherwise the day after tomorrow) to the official Raspbian repository and update G-DASH. You will get a notification on your G-DASH website, or via pushbullet if you enabled push notifications. Please update your Pi first, than update Gulden by restarting your Pi and then wait for 10 minutes for everything to be installed and running.

For G-DASH this will be version 0.99 as they need some more time to finalize everything and to give users some time to find some bugs that may still be present. Before witnessing commences Bastijn promises to have version 1.0 ready.

For further information on Gulden compared to Bitcoin have a look at dev.gulden.com.