One small release for MintCoin, one minty release for mankind.
I'm feeling especially minty today, since we finally have a new release of the MintCoin wallet!
While the plan was to publish a release candidate today, we had positive feedback from beta users and no additional changes, so I decided to push the schedule and make the release today the official 2.1.0 release.
You can read all about the release - and download the new softare - on the GitHub release page:
https://github.com/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet/releases/tag/v2.1.0
Please have a look at the notes there to see a summary of some of the most important fixes and changes with this release.
While this release doesn't solve all of the MintCoin problems, it gives us a much more solid foundation moving forward.
For Windows, we only have a 32-bit release. For some unknown reason, the 64-bit version does not work - a problem that we have had for 3 years already. Luckily the 32-bit version works fine, now that we know how to build a version that can access up to 3 GB of RAM.
We do have a Windows installer, which is basically expected by Windows users.
The release only inludes the command-line version of the Linux executable. We need a static version due to all of the library dependencies, and Qt (used for the GUI) does not support static builds on Linux. This shouldn't be a major problem as most Linux users are at least somewhat familiar with building software. Still, I'll be aiming to make packages for popular distributions soon.
For macOS, we just ship a ZIP archive and hope for the best. I don't have an Apple computer to test on. It looks like it should be possible to make a DMG file in the future to allow macOS users to do the normal drag & drop installation that many applications do. We'll look at that in the future.
The most important missing bit is a way to automatically get a snapshot of the MintCoin blockchain. Now that the wallet connects to peers without trouble and no longer crashes due to memory issues, this is the biggest pain point for new users.
We should probably try to replicate something like FlutterCoin has. This is documented in this GitHub issue:
MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet#83
So... what now?
For the short term, I will continue to spend time fixing the MintCoin wallet and adding some improvements. I'll try to work with some of the administrators and get a sustainable community going. We can use all the help we can get. 😉
In the long term, who knows? I really prefer a proof-of-stake crypto currency, because of the reduced energy requirements. And I prefer a community crypto currency, because I believe that we should favor technologies that benefit everyone instead of rich investors. Hopefully these things are important to you too, and so MintCoin is important to you also.
Keep Minting,
Shane Kerr
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
