HODL Program Classes Update

MWC Team

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April 26, 2020

The MWC Team is extremely fortunate to have professional multi-decade veteran Silicon Valley developers working on the MWC product. Several of these developers focus almost exclusively on quality assurance and testing of the MWC project code. The HODL Program code has been finished and is currently being tested by these quality assurance developers.

DOING IT RIGHT

Jimmy Song said, “The only ones [altcoins] I would consider are the ones with good developers who want to create good technology. The best developers I have seen in the altcoin space are Monero, Zcash and the Decred guys and maybe GRIN also. I do not know any of them but the tech I have seen from them seems to be pretty solid.”

The MWC Team strives to create cool technology while at the same time doing it right by not cutting corners, thoroughly reviewing the code and engaging in extensive testing. With decades of experience working for the largest tech companies in Silicon Valley they are bringing the same type of professional discipline to the building of this innovative monetary product.

GRIN BUGS

While MWC is grateful for the interesting technology the GRIN team has developed, unfortunately, as is common with complicated software development there have been numerous bugs to find and fix.

For example, the MWC Team released their own native QT GUI wallet and fixed numerous bugs in GRIN. Some of these bug fixes have been merged into GRIN itself. The MWC Team is glad that their high quality code has found its way into other interesting projects.

We are grateful to TradeOgre for finding a bug in grin-wallet which the MWC Team then fixed. There was a nasty deadlock bug in GRIN which caused MWC pools to freeze that was also fixed.

Additionally, MWCMQS is based on Grinbox which does not support SSL on Windows. Before the release of MWC mainnet and because the MWC Team takes user privacy extremely seriously, therefore, they implemented a secure version of MWCMQS.

When it comes to something as important as the distribution of the HODL Program rewards the MWC Team is going to do whatever they can to make sure they do it right. Consequently, they are grateful for the patience of all the MWC Hodlers and the vote of confidence from the new MWC buyers as they write, review and test the HODL Program code.

HODL PROGRAM AND REGISTRATION

The only statement about the HODL Program distribution has been:

“At least 50% of the MWC in the HODL Program will be distributed to holders that have MWC that has not been moved after block 202,500.”

The HODL Program registration was released in MWC QT Wallet 1.0.15 on April 7, 2020. The MWC Team feels that timely updated aggregated statistics on HODL registration should be made publicly available for numerous reasons and should be done as soon as possible. Therefore, almost immediately after release the Class History API data feed was released and then updated approximately hourly as the HODL server scans the outputs from the registered wallets.

The classes were broken up based on a period of blocks.

Class 1 starts at block 0 and ends at block 202,500. [hard-fork]

Class 2 starts at block 202,501 and ends at block 212,580. [first emission rate change]

Class 3 starts at block 212,581 and ends at block 385,380.

Within a few weeks of release more than 6,600,000 MWC were registered in Class 1 and 32,656 in Class 2. This was completely unexpected by the MWC Team.

For example, the airdrop registration was open for approximately three months and a very large percentage of the 148,000+ BTC registered were done within the final week. Likewise the MWC Team expected MWC hodlers to register much closer to the first distribution’s deadline. After all, why provide such a signal to the market any sooner than needed?

Anyway, because the amount registered in Class 1 was so large and so early it opens the possibility of simplifying the class periods by combining Class 1 and Class 2 without violating the 50% distribution announcement. This will make it easier and less complicated for new users who are learning about MWC and for current hodlers in making their buy, sell and hodl decisions.

Consequently, the new class periods will be:

Class 1 starts at block 0 and ends at block 212,580.

Class 2 starts at block 212,581 and ends at block 385,380.

HODL SPECULATION

It will be interesting to see how many additional MWC register for the HODL Program. Currently, there are about 1,372,000 MWC unregistered.

There have been approximately 15,000 MWC mined during Class 2 and more than 50,000 MWC registered. For further discussion on this a user in Discord has been posting some very interesting charts created from the publicly available API endpoints. There is a good chance that buyers are withdrawing from exchanges to wallets registered for the HODL Program.

April 26, 2020 - Aggregate HODL Program Registration Statistics

HODL PROGRAM PURPOSE

Please keep in mind that the HODL Program serves multiple purposes. Along with the airdrop, one purpose is to help establish the initial stock of MWC in extremely strong hodl hands during the infancy years of the product.

It will be an interesting market process to see what price is required to get them to sell. Perhaps some will never sell? After all, many Bitcoin hodlers have been able to not only keep but also increase their Bitcoin stacks because of forks and airdrops. Forks or airdrops for MWC hodlers, specifically targeting those loyal hodlers in Class 1, could act like a perpetual HODL program. And it should be kept in mind that once MWC are moved out of Class 1 they can never be moved back in.

But more importantly, another purpose is to act as a very important check and balance on the possibility of a hidden inflation bug being abused. This would manifest itself as more MWC being registered than are supposed to exist under the consensus rules.

For example, if someone were able to find and abuse a hidden inflation bug and then attempt to financially profit by selling on an exchange then it is likely that a buyer would withdraw the coins and register them in the HODL Program. Because the GRIN supply is created solely through mining, therefore, it is not possible to check for hidden inflation using this type of economic incentive.

Keep in mind that this would be made manifest to the public in near real-time unlike the Zcash hidden inflation bug which could have been abused by the Zcash developers without detection. As reported by Bitcoinist, “In October, eight months after discovery, the bug was surreptitiously patched during a planned network upgrade. Although Zcash have stated that they do not believe the bug was exploited, they cannot be certain.”

CONCLUSION

As with any experimental project, please be reasonable and responsible in your participation with MWC. While the MWC Team is doing the best they can, nevertheless, this is an extremely complicated and difficult task for anyone to engage in. The Mimblewimble whitepaper and Fuchsbauer paper are hard enough to understand and successfully implementing them in software code is even more difficult.

And that can be clearly seen by the work of some of the ‘best developers I have seen in the altcoin space’ still releasing software like GRIN with serious bugs or Zcash with a critical hidden inflation bug.

This is not meant to be critical of their efforts but instead to highlight that the talented, skilled and hard working developers of Monero, Zcash, GRIN, MWC and other projects are doing something really hard. They should all be applauded because what they are attempting to accomplish is very difficult, requires hard work and they are actually building something!

Day by day and year by year Bitcoin has earned user’s trust by, as recently discussed by Stephen Livera and Chris Belcher, performing well the job of loudly storing and indiscreetly announcing the transferring of value. MWC is the most technologically superior ghost money on the market that performs the job of silently storing and stealthily transferring value. Objectively, this is a more difficult job to do than what Bitcoin has done.

And if this job were easy to perform then there may be more product options on the market and less chain analysis businesses, rich lists and whale alerts. MWC will serve to the best ability possible its customers who are the buyers and hodlers. To be clear, MWC's customers are not investigators, journalists, chain analysis companies or other snoopy individuals or institutions. Nevertheless, gaining the confidence and trust of users in MWC’s ability to perform that job tomorrow is earned today, hour by hour and minute by minute, as new blocks continue to be mined.

MWC is still largely unknown because it does not have a full listing with CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko or many other data aggregation sites despite the MWC Team’s contact and suggestion. Nevertheless, MWC is less than six months old but by market capitalization is the #3 privacy coin behind Monero and Zcash and the #14 proof of work coin behind Decred.

As trust in MWC continues growing day by day and word of the existence of the elusive extremely scarce ghost money spreads, hopefully, MWC will also continue climbing the market capitalization rankings to the benefit of buyers and hodlers. After all, opinions will be arbitrated by the market in the orderbooks.

The first HODL reward is likely to be relatively small in order to function as a test for future larger rewards. Hopefully, everything goes well and the larger rewards will distributed shortly after the successful first reward. Nevertheless, the successful HODL Program distributions will serve as more functional software delivery by the MWC Team. So stay tuned!