DigiByte Community Update — July 11, 2021: DGB Development, History, Twitter, Gitter & More

A video for this article with slightly ad-libbed speech can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4WIGu6UurQ&t=999s

Hello everyone, Jared Tate here, the founder of the DigiByte blockchain.

How is everyone doing today? I want to take some time and help turn some lemons into lemonade and address many of the issues that have come before the community and clear up some misunderstandings. Including those around the new Gitter chat, Twitter, DGB development, and misguided claims I am attempting to be a “dictator” and control everything behind the scenes, which is completely non-true as I have a 7-year track record proving otherwise but I will get into in a minute.

But before we get further into details I want to wish everyone well, I hope your summer, or for those of you down under your winter is going well. And I want to thank each and every one of you who Believes in DigiByte and works daily to move DGB forward. I am not here to criticize or condemn any specific person, but I am here to help shed some light on everything from a 10,000 ft perspective and give you some historical context on some things.

I know many of you out there have spent an enormous amount of time working to make DigiByte better. 100s, and thousands of hours. I myself at this point have spent almost 1/3 of my life and thousands and thousands of unpaid hours on DGB. So I see nothing but an immense desire in the community to make DigiByte better each and every day. It truly is humbling to see the love and tireless effort many in the community have poured into DGB. From Josiah to the foundation guys to the DigiByte awareness team and many more, truly, thank you all.

DGB has come a very very long way from its humble beginnings in my Idaho Garage in the fall of 2013. The community has grown immensely these past couple of years and continues to grow. It has been awe-inspiring to see. With such growth, however, comes more and newer issues to contend with.

When DGB first launched all development discussion was 100% conducted in the open transparently either on the public DigByte IRC channel or on Bitcointalk or eventually GitHub. Most of us back then did not know each other’s true identities and we all just knew each other by pen names. The community was much much smaller back then and on any given day I or others could talk directly to most other devs and passionate community members. With rapid growth from 2017 onwards, this has become downright impossible.

One day in Feb 2018 I woke up to 100,000 notifications across numerous platforms. It was completely overwhelming. When I first launched DGB in 2014 I was the only one around, so at that time I needed to register a website, all social media accounts, GitHub, emails, back-end services, and much more that was needed to get things started. Over the past seven years, I have gone platform by platform and service by service and turned over complete control or full admin rights to numerous other trusted community members.

Dozens if not 100s of other people by this point in time in various capacities. IF someone stepped up, showed clear competence and passion for DGB we would hand the reigns over to them for whatever their specialty was. And many people have come and gone from the project over the years in different capacities. No one is paid a salary, after all, to work on DGB. Except for a few bounties, it’s all-volunteer. So people do come and go.

I want to clarify for people at this time my current active involvement with DGB. First off, I still am involved, although not full time as I have many personal projects underway outside of DGB that keep food on my table and a roof over my head, yet still these will benefit DGB in the long run.

At this time I have nothing to do with DigiByte Reddit, I do not actively moderate any telegram channels, I have no control over the DigiByte.org domain name, I share admin access with multiple other devs on GitHub and I do not have the authority to solo approve any code changes, or to even delete the GitHub as it is a shared organization. I have turned over support infrastructure services to the foundation and others and I have given multiple other community members access to the Twitter account and rarely tweet from it as I used to as we have tried to move to a broader community-based approach to form a consensus on info before it is put out. I also at one point advocated for the deletion of the main Twitter account but was talked out of that by numerous community members explaining its benefits for DGB.

If I truly was trying to be a dictator and control everything I never would have done any of the above. In fact, the reason we sometimes have conflicting messaging across the internet for DGB is that it is decentralized and there is no central authority micromanaging everything across all platforms and discussion boards. It is truly a grassroots decentralized project, you cannot expect seamless agreement 100% of the time. That would be impossible to achieve.

One thing I have learned in life is you are never going to get everyone to agree on every single thing all the time. But this problem is further amplified by a lack of clear communication and complete transparency for everyone to participate in said discussions in the first place.

As the community began to rapidly grow from 2018 onwards multiple groups began to self-organized and self orient towards specific action items. We saw this with the DigiByte Awareness Team, the DigiByte Foundation Team, and more. All of which I actively encouraged to organically grow without my direct involvement. As I wanted them to stand on their own without me appearing to direct them.

As different groups began to form so did different private chat groups on specific topics ranging from marketing to development and more. This was done with good intentions to make things more efficient and productive. However, the sheer amount of different chats was not only overwhelming to many but lacked clear open transparent communication and often left many other community members in the dark leading to the situation we are now in. No single person is to blame for this, it is simply a side effect of rapidly growing a decentralized network and community.

While I agree there is no absolutely official social media, company, or group for DigiByte there is in fact 1 single official source of truth for DigiByte and that is the core code. The core code that is actively deployed network-wide is at the end of the day the ultimate official source of truth for DigiByte.

Unfortunately, that code is quite complex and can be completely daunting to non-developer and non-technical people. Many times lack of understanding on a deep technical level has led to miss understandings and FUD and as we know bad ideas and misinformation can travel rapidly. Especially as trolls seize on the moment to spread FUD and buy-in at cheaper DGB processes. And the discussion around these issues occurs in private chats.

Even worse in the past, non-developers have created issues and severely negatively impacted things even with good intentions which is why many people decided to come together to outline a new development process where no one single person could be a point of failure, myself included.

Anyone is free to submit a pull request to the DigiByte GitHub for improvements. However, many times people submit PR’s with no working code, no clear explanation, no hard data, and no laymen’s explanation to the public community for what it is. Then when “the devs” are blamed for not working on that PR and finishing it when it wasn’t deemed an immediate priority all sorts of baseless allegations arise. Keep in mind all the “devs” are volunteers who all have other day jobs attempting to help when they can. We don’t force anyone to code.

Even worse some times inaccurate and misleading claims are made by inexperienced devs/ These claims nonetheless manifest into social media FUD that must be addressed. At the end of the day, this cycle is painful, but that is why we can claim to be “battle-hardened.”

Yet devs are still people, and after a while grow tired of constant public harassment and belittling. This is why most quality devs I have come across in the blockchain world are not actively engaging in social media. They don’t want the toxicity and drama. And they rarely give out their identity and info.

But it is important to discuss who exactly the “Devs” are who are the gatekeepers to code additions to DigiByte. This is simple, they are all individuals who have contributed meaningful, working code in the past to DGB and the project. Not bug-ridden, damaging show-stopping code. Some of these quality devs I still do not know personally to this day and others I did not know for several years. All we go off of is the quality and the content of their code in the beginning.

It is also important to further clarify 2 distinct roles on Github. The role of GitHub code “maintainer” and that of reviewer/ auditor. Anyone can be a reviewer and auditor, the more the merrier. However, there are only a handful of core “maintainers.” This process functions similarly to Bitcoin or Ethereum. This is essential to prevent malicious code and critical bugs from being introduced to the core code. Maintainers have been selected by other devs who have audited their code with a proven track record. All that is needed to become a maintainer is to contribute quality code that improves things without breaking stuff.

That’s it, but much easier than it sounds. This is how pretty much all open-source projects work. Those who make quality code submissions are recognized and adopted by other devs. Bad code and damaging code is rejected until fixed, not forever, not permanently, just rejected until fixed so as not to break things. Sometimes people just do not truly understand the level of complexity they are getting into with a blockchain code addition. This is not their fault, it’s just reality. The code doesn’t lie.

To bring complete transparency and new quality developers in we wanted to make sure all development talk was clearly publicly visible in a chat. Since we all work with the DigiByte GitHub and Gitter is a chat designed for chatting around GitHub with direct links to Github for organizing clear communication we decided it was the perfect solution for the problem we were having. Ie no clear source for open public development communication like we used to have with IRC.

I myself even have shared great ideas and insights in private chats I wish had been publicly documented on Gitter. Another reason Gitter was chosen as it is dev-centric, quite often other public dev chats get overrun by non-technical discussions that make it hard to organize and conduct a decentralized discussion on specific topics. Github is where developers live & do their work, not Twitter, not telegram, and not youtube.

So to reiterate, anyone can submit a pull request to DGB, but we ask it be clearly documented, tested with working code so other developers can audit it. No single dev can approve changes alone, and every developer currently reviewing changes has a proven track record of committing working code to the project. Join the Gitter chat and contribute, it’s open to anyone, all you need is a GitHub account.

We cannot approve every single pull request made because as stated before quite often they are not tested, not finished, not even coded, and quite often mistakenly and unknowingly break other parts of the core protocol. Just look at Bitcoin. Maybe 5% of PR’s ever get merged into core.

As DGB grows in market cap it becomes much much harder to make big changes to the core protocol. That’s just the reality of the situation. We as devs do not blame those who don’t know what they don’t know and don’t understand why they sometimes are introducing critical vulnerabilities. No one dev is perfect, I myself have accidentally introduced bugs in the past that later had to be fixed. This is why we want as many eyes on the code as possible in a completely public, transparent manner. Not in siloed private chats.

This brings me to the third topic, the focus and efficient use of time and resources. Many of the devs working on DGB are in fact also working on commercial applications for DGB in their own ways. Most of these devs are busy, don’t like being on social media, and don’t spend all their time making youtube videos. They are working. Myself included.

Numerous devs, myself included and many others in the community have agreed that our biggest missing thing right now is a clear and concise set of development tools making it easier for others to build on top of DigiByte. We all agreed this should be our focus and that the core DigiByte protocol as it stands right now is in a very good place.

This is what we are tentatively calling “DigiSuite”. Details of which we will share and propose to the community as they emerge. To get collaboration and more input from everyone.

This does not mean there cannot be other improvements made to the core protocol at the same time, but that is not as important as making it super easy to build on top of DGB. That gives all of us the best reward for our time. We have been refining the core protocol for 7 years after all.

Moving forward other core devs have made it clear to me, and I feel the same way that only clear, concise, tested documented changes that are publicly visible should be included to make core improvements. Also, all development discussion among devs needs to be publicly visible so more people can participate and get everyone on the same page.

At this stage, we simply cannot afford a bug-ridden hard fork or bad pull request that breaks things and causes problems as we have seen in the past. We have to be very diligent moving forward. Even the best people with great intentions can cause severe problems in a highly technical code base like DigiByte. I know this because I have made mistakes in the past with good intentions, no one is perfect.

To conclude, we are not here to blame anyone person for anything, quite the contrary, we have a lot of things to be excited about and thankful for. Many good things are underway for DigiByte, and creating a clear stream and process anyone can easily participate in will lead to an explosion of new growth and potential.

Let us all get on the same page. Let us all communicate publicly and transparently and let’s all rock this new process and get many more people involved. Let’s avoid toxicity and focus on positive moves forward that benefit DigiByte for the better. As stated for one final time. I cannot thank you all enough for all you do for DigiByte. Till next time. Jared Out