Announcing the Zcash Gardening Club - a monthly open Zcash development call

Ecosystem Updates
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Hey everybody,

Great chatting with you this morning, it was great to put faces to names, and meet other contributors. Many thanks to the organizers for bringing the Garden Club community together. :- )

Recap

Today, I shared some development updates about Insight’s Observatory project (roadmap, repository), which is on open-source suite of Zcash network security tools that enable any node operator to analyze p2p network performance and detect phenomena such as potential double spending, selfish mining, etc.

Here are my slides for the dev call, which include some status updates and preliminary results. You can also informally catch up on some of or early research into block propagation time and transaction lock times.

Observatory status update

Advanced logging (submitted as pull request to Zcash)
NetSec alerts (prototyped)
Research pipelines (prototyped)
Public research database
Public network security/performance dashboard

Observatory development support

We’d like to thank the Zcash Foundation for generous financial support that enabled us to launch this initiative and develop the observatory tooling.

We are creating a public research database, open-source alerting system, and community dashboard. The Observatory Project is seeking patrons to fund the continued creation and operation of these public utilities. (Individuals or entities may opt to remain anonymous, or be recognized publicly as a sponsor of key open-source tooling for the Zcash ecosystem.)

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(Fiat donations are appreciated, contact Mitchell)

Request for feedback

One last request - we want the Zcash observatory to be useful for you, the broader community. We’d love input, especially:

  • What observatory features would you find useful?
  • What data format/interface would be easiest for you to utilize?
  • Technical input and research ideas are always welcome!

Always feel free to shoot me a message at mitchell@InsightFellows.com if you have questions, comments, or suggestions.

(Edit: Thanks for the tip @Shawn, I’m checking out the repos now!)

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My apologies for not being there, maybe the next one.

It would have been nice if someone from the organizers had contacted me to let me know it was going to be yesterday … msg that says is was going to be May 5 was posted only here late May 4. I am not following the forum that close but i was hoping to be an opportunity to meet some community members.

Glad to hear there were some good chats, Observatory tools are looking good.

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is there a recorded version ?

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@oxarbitrage - I am sorry you missed the call. You should have received a reminder email but I will make sure that doesn’t happen to you next month.

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Hi everyone - here is the recording from yesterday’s call.
Password: 0x*I%7Ft

@ryan.taylor will post it to our youtube channel later this week.

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One thing I believe is confusing is that there are two links - one to register for the event and one to present a project.

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this was an error on my part, I manually added presenters who hadn’t registered through zoom and I must have missed your email. I’ll make sure you’re registered for June.

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It is fine, i am not a good speaker anyway but i do want to be the most closer to the community i can and i think the garderning idea is a good oportunity for it.

i will make sure to be there in the next one, i was very busy the first days of may finalizing my work for april so i didnt paid enough attention to the forum. thanks for the recording links, will listen to that tomorrow. great work.

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Nice, thanks for posting the recording @elenita, it was really awesome to see so many new projects being built on Zcash!

Zbay, Zinga, ZecPages, are all new to me within the last few months and I’m super excited that so many bright minds are contributing to the Zcash ecosystem. These kinds of projects are great ways to use Zcashs privacy protecting features to build things that users will see as valuable even if they are not familiar with how Zcash itself works.

Thanks for all the work you all are putting into the projects!

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After listening to the recording, the first edition was great, all projects are looking good.

All speakers please feel free to contact me anytime for zcashd features :slight_smile:

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Hiya Gardeners! @elenita @nathan-at-least is there another installment this Friday?

Where do folks sign up?

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When I follow that link, I am told that the survey is closed?

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Ok, I just DM’d you the link on Keybase, LMK if you got it. :slight_smile:

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Hi, I’d like to donate! Is there any way I can receive a tax deduction for the donation?

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There’s a meeting today: Gardening Club - June

They are always on the first Tuesday. Did something suggest it would be on a Friday?

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Oooppps… somehow I thought it was the 5th of each month, now I know.

First Tuesday.

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New registration link everyone!
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYvcuuhpz8pGdY0qOgr1AKPhy4FAofv1Zgi

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39

An idea for Gardening Club, how about a communal Greenhouse ?

Maybe some of the small projects would benefit from some minimal hosting, perhaps a dedicated server chopped up into VPS servers with enough resources to run a node. Somewhere seedlings can sprout before being transplanted :slight_smile:

Edit: The idea came from the Raspberry Pi world which is teeming with amateur devs and a hosting company in NL that hosts 500 Pi in a rack.

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Just saw this. I like it.

There could be a single shared container on the same host with a non-wallet txindex=1 zcashd for any projects that want to scan the blockchain. If you want to do the leg work to set it up, I could help pay hosting fees.

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