#factomproject

Our dev team has released improved Factom binaries and installers, follow the guides available at http://factom.org/howto for step by step guides on how to install and use our software. Below is a breakdown on what the changes are.

Main fix: Factomd now works past block 22880 A quirk of Milestone1 code caused some unexpected behavior. Existing client software will crash if restarted after downloading past block 22880. If users (like exchanges) did not shut down factomd, they would not have seen this problem, and functioned normally. Only when restarting would this bug have manifested itself. All users must upgrade to restart.

No Factoids have been lost, and the chain is still safely secured by bitcoin.

If you see this error, it is time to update to factomd v0.3.5. You can tell the version by running factom-cli properties (but see the last note too).

panic: Error in initializing dChain:000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000c DBHeight:22880 i:22881

(for those unable to upgrade to the latest factomd, a workaround is to delete the databases in the .factom/ldb/* folder. This will cause factom to re-download the blockchain and will process the latest blocks. Closing and re-running factomd will cause the above panic)

This is the patch to fix the bug for the curious.

Koinify Import Note Factom-cli importing has changed slightly for the Koinify 12 words and paper wallets (Fs keys).

Use the command “factom-cli importaddress” instead of “factom-cli generateaddress”. Also, the similar “factom-cli newaddress” command has been deprecated.

Lesser, but also important fixes Compiling from source now works again.

The source code repository https://code.google.com/ was shut down recently. Any project which used libraries hosted there (including factomd) stopped being buildable. We switched to alternate repositories for the missing code. This update allows developers to simultaneously pull and build factom using the friendly ‘go get’ commands.

https://github.com/FactomProject/FactomDocs/blob/master/communityTesterDirections.md#install-factom

Minor annoyance resolved Windows users of factomd had error messages complaining about log files. Internally, when two different subsets of factomd accessed the same log file. It now writes to two different log files and the error is gone.

Developer focused updates API updates

Our fctwallet can now build the chain and entry commit data structures.  API users now no longer have to do bitwise manipulation to place data into Factom.

A new fctwallet API call has been added to programmatically determine the txid before submission. 

Factom now also has a call to verify address validity.

This update also added the ability to use a remote factomd.  fctwallet and factom-cli are now able to access a factomd node on a remote server, allowing medium trust applications to be built. Communication between fctwallet and factomd does not need to be secret. No private keys are passed between the two programs, only signed public data. This will allow multiple users to be able to share a single factomd instance.

Advanced Config File User’s Note Mac If you have made any changes to your .factom/factomd.conf file, it will have been renamed to .factom/old_pre035_factomd.conf with the latest installer. Non-advanced users who have not made changes to this file will use the default internal configurations.

Linux and Windows Only advanced users will have created the file factomd.conf in the .factom directory.  

If you have a config file and use fctwallet, it must be updated with new options. Please add this to the bottom the factomd.conf file:

FactomdAddress                   = localhost FactomdPort                          = 8088

If the config file is not updated, factom-cli and fctwallet will not show balances and will result in these errors:

$ factom-cli properties Failed to retrieve properties

$ factom-cli balances Error printing addresses Command Failed:  Server Error

$ factom-cli list all Failed to parse the response from factomd: Server Error

Also API calls will result in:

$ curl -X GET "http://localhost:8089/v1/factoid-get-fee/" {"Response":"Get http://:0/v1/factoid-get-fee/: dial tcp :0: getsockopt: connection refused","Success":false}

Our Chief Architect, Paul Snow, attended The North American Bitcoin Conference (TNABC) in Miami this week. During his presentation he demonstrated how Factom lends scalable solutions. No matter how much data is entered into Factom, the Bitcoin footprint remains the same. Entities using Factom don't have to access all of Factom in order to track their info, this translates to a small memory/storage footprint for users.

He also clarified why permissionless systems need incentive mechanism like Factoids in our case and how these are converted to Entry Credits with a fixed price that users can budget for without concern for volatility in Factoid price.

Below are some pictures from the event.

Factom Interviews Our Chief Scientist, Brian Deery, has had a great interview on The Crypto Show discussing economics, Bitcoin, the Mike Hearn drama, and proposed fixes.

Paul Snow was interviewed by Rick Stoner on Doged Radio, it’s a two hour long interview where Paul goes in-depth about Factom, Factoids, Bitcoin and a lot more.

Koinify is shutting down, what about Factoids (FCT)? Following previous notice, Koinify is officially shutting down by Feb 15th, 2016. After that, all Koinify website functions and data, including wallets will be completely wiped out and no longer available. How does this affect Factom Software Sale contributors? It doesn’t affect them at all. To use or redeem your Factoids purchased on Koinify, you must use tools provided by Factom directly. Koinify.com does not provide any Factom access functions and none of your Factoids were ever stored on Koinify.

Most of the contributors should have by now redeemed their Factoids (FCT) either in our Wallet or onto Poloniex easy to use import tool. If you still haven’t done so look at our guides at http://factom.org/howto for instruction on how to install and use our command-line wallet, GUI wallet and the FactoidPapermill which can be used as a paer wallet.

You will need your Koinify 12 Word Master Passphrase to redeem your Factoids, this was shown to all software sale contributors at the time of purchase via a pop up window stating to write down the passphrase and store it in a safe place. Failure to do so would incur in the loss of Factoids as neither Koinify nor Factom are able to retrieve the passphrase.

Thanks for being an awesome and supportive community.

A project that proposes using blockchain technology to shift the traditional international trade business took first place and won the prize of USD 30,000 during the Shanghai Blockchain Hackathon hosted by the Wanxiang Blockchain Lab and Deloitte at the Bund Center. The winning idea was created by the CargoChain team, aiming to secure and transmit trade documents with lower cost and pollution.

A plan from the Smart Property team that proposes creating smart contracts to assist property sales transactions took second place with a prize of USD 20,000. Third place went to the Medical Records team, which developed an idea, built on Factom, for a platform that uses blockchain technology to store medical records and prescriptions immutably, which could reduce the insurance fraud and costs with a simple medical history verification process. The Nevermore, Food Chain, Random Number Generator teams were awarded special prizes. The FBS Capital special award went to the Bitsmile team, which came up with an idea for a mobile app that would integrate charitable donations with blockchain technology, making donations transparent with the ability to trace the flow of money for each transaction.

First Prize Winners

Second Prize Winners

Third Prize Winners

The competition was fierce. The other teams also presented excellent proposals with demos, and covered a wide range of application scenarios. They included federated equity exchange, credit information sharing, RMB digitization and circulation, education certification, insurance agent credit rating and etc.

Today’s judges, who are renowned experts or entrepreneurs in the blockchain industry included, amongst others, Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum and David Johnston, Chairman of Factom. They reviewed all the final business plans and shared their insights on how they could be improved.

Special Prize Winners

Special Prize Winners

In his welcome address, the vice chairman and executive director of Wanxiang Group and the founder of Wanxiang Blockchain Lab, Dr. Xiao Feng, introduced the background of the lab and the series of projects launched since its establishment. He also mentioned that a blockchain technology enabled cloud platform and a blockchain series of books are in the works. He believed the business plans presented during today’s competition would go on to influence business in the real world. The proposals presented would plug into the blockchain ecosystem and further expand it.

Ms. Qin Yi, Deloitte Partner for Asia Pacific, set the stage for the three day long competition with an informative keynote speech that introduced the research result and business progress of their Rubix team, a Deloitte blockchain technology R&D team established one year ago with more than 100 members across Ireland, Canada and other regions. One of the Rubix based applications is PermaRec, a global distributed ledger, connecting to SAP, Oracle and other financial reporting systems that enables real time verification, full coverage of trails for audit work and automated tax compliance reporting, and benefits both the users and regulators.

The hackathon attracted entries from more than 100 participants with more than 20 teams from around the world. The large number of participants at the event is the evidence of the important advantages that blockchain technology brings to our social ecosystem. It also shows the influence the blockchain has had in China as well as its glamour to attract high level talents.

The past year has been a fruitful one for blockchain development. It has been the interest of the most influential worldwide financial institutions. The Wanxiang Blockchain Lab has responded to the growing trend towards the increasing demand of such technology among the regulators, corporations, developers and venture capital by organizing the blockchain hackathon with Deloitte, to create an atmosphere and instrument of innovation and set up a bridge between business initiatives and capital through the interaction between research and investment. To better support them, the lab has also launched several new initiatives including a global sponsorship program, BlockGrant X, and training program, BlockTrain X, aimed at encouraging people to leverage this new technology creatively and drive innovation.

Below are some pictures taken during the event.

Thanks for being an awesome and supportive community.

We are thrilled to announce that there have been over 100,000 entries in Factom so far. On December 30th the 100,000th entry was made into our blockchain marking an impressive milestone for us.

Another notable statistic is the number of blocks generated on the Factom network, we are nearing 17,500 at the time of writing.

Our software is being used progressively more by our partners and customers, after four months from the Factom Genesis we couldn’t be happier about the network usage and reliability. “Factomizing” on our network using Factom Chains is one of the advantages we offer compared to anchoring and time stamping every entry directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain.

We reached 100,000 entries in a very short timeframe and at a fraction of the cost of doing so directly on Bitcoin. Factom is working on providing a platform that can scale to million of entries per customer while keeping costs low and the Bitcoin blockchain bloat at bay.

This is a great way for us to end the year while we look forward to 2016 when we will deliver our 2nd and 3rd milestones, announce new partnerships and customers, as wells as helping make governments, businesses, and institutions easily auditable, transparent and honest. Stay tuned.

Thanks for being an awesome and supportive community. We wish you all a Happy New Year!

We are thrilled to announce the winner for our first Twitter bounty: the 12 days of Factom. It took a while to go through the numerous entries but we appreciated every single one of them. We have now chosen the winner which you can see below together with some of the best entries. We will proceed to get in contact with the winner to payout the prize. We want to thank every single one of you who participated and look forward to host more bounties in the future.

Our winner: Sandro Ieva

Below are some of the top entries in no particular order:

All of the entries were greatly appreciated by the team, to see them all search for #factomxmas on Twitter.

Thanks for being an awesome and supportive community.

Hi All,

There’s been some confusion about the Honduras title project and I’d like to take the opportunity to clear up some misconceptions.

Yes, the project has stalled. We were hoping to have a working prototype deployed by the end of the year, but as 2015 comes to a close, we’ll all have to wait another year to deploy a blockchain backed land title system that is both tamper-proof and transparent.

I’ve had humbling conversations with many smart people in the world of international land title including a CEO of major title insurance company, international policy experts, and companies that have built and sold land title software for decades. They all agree that this is a very common occurrence. The project is political in nature, and government systems move slower than we all would like.

I do want to give a shout out to the hard working people in Honduras that have helped us get this far. We have support from top-level government officials, and we are working to launch a prototype project. We have also been working on the software with our partners at Epigraph. We’ll continue to plug away on these projects and others that use the blockchain to make secure and transparent processes and systems.

I also want to clarify some of the concern about the reports and news articles that have come out both for and against the project. Each of the reporters that I worked with directly did a tremendous amount of research and due diligence before writing the articles. We put them directly in touch with Honduras officials, who for reasons of their own were unable to comment. We also had approval before going on the record with any of these news organizations.

Factom has always stood for honesty and transparency, and we welcome your questions. The letter of intent between the Honduran government and Factom/Epigraph includes some amount of non-disclosure language, so we’ve had to be quiet about the business model and non-technical details of the project. However, we’re always thrilled to discuss the technology behind the solution and explore new ways to move forward.

Have a Merry Christmas.

We are thrilled to announce that Yuanbao is the first Chinese cryptocurrency exchange to have added support for the factoids software tokens. After our software sale, and our visit to China’s Blockchain Summit, earlier this year, the Chinese community has been eager for a platform on which to trade factoids. Yuanbao is Factom’s officially recommended partner for the Chinese/Asian market.

We have released binaries and installers for the Factom client to make it easier for users to transfer tokens as they wish. You can find our guides together with the installers for Windows, Mac, and Linux here: http://factom.org/howto.

Yuanbao has chosen “Factom factoids” as the clearest way to list factoids on their platform, given many people aren’t aware of the technical details of the Factom Network or its use of “factoids”, but know the project simply as “Factom”.

Yuanbao Exchange is one of China's largest digital assets exchange, with a daily trading volume of around 5 million USD. They have been on the market for more than two years already, and currently have 18 coins been successfully traded on the platform, factoids will be the 19th. We are happy to partner with a reliable and trustworthy service to allow all Asian users to be able to purchase access to our software with factoids.

Following the exchange announcement, below are the details on when factoids deposits and trading will be available for users in different timezones.

Friday, 18 December 2015, 3:00 PM China Standard Time (07:00 AM GMT/UTC, 02:00 AM EST). Deposit of Factoids will be opened so that users can prepare themselves for trading and deposit the necessary funds.

Monday, 21 December 2015, 10:00 AM China Standard Time (02:00 AM GMT/UTC, Sunday 20 December 2015, 09:00 PM EST). Trading of Factoids/CNY officially opens.

“Factom has been well accepted in the Chinese community. Partnering with Yuanbao is a very important step of Factom’s plan to land in China. The partnership will further deepen the roots of Factom into the community.” Stated Jack Lu, Factom CTO

“We are looking forward to supporting public and private projects in China that leverage the blockchain. And partnering with Yuanbao is a significant and strategic step to building Factom’s presence in China.” Said Paul Snow, Factom Chief Architect

“Our experience working with Factom was very pleasant and productive. We are happy to support a leading company like Factom on our exchange. Of course, we will look forward to working together and melding together our strengths based on their promising blockchain applications.” Continued Jelena Strelnikova, Foreign Cooperation Officer, Yuanbao.

For more info find the Factom project description page here, the factoids trading page will go live on Monday.

Thanks again to our awesome community of open source contributors and volunteer supporters.

[BOUNTY] Win $100 in BTC + 100 Factoids for Best Tweet - Ends December 25, 8:00PM CET!

Christmas is coming and we are thrilled to announce our 12 Days of Factom Twitter Bounty. Anyone with a Twitter account can participate and win a prize of $100 worth of BTC + 100 Factoids. We want to hear how transparency and verification in record keeping can make a change for businesses and institutions. Tweet to us about use cases, ideas for new projects, or what you’d like to build on our platform…

The winning entry will be selected after the end of the bounty for the best creative, insightful, witty, inspiring, and popular Tweet. You can tweet as many times as you like with a picture, a meme, a slogan, an idea, etc. To be eligible, your Tweets need to contain both @factomproject and the hashtag #factomxmas.

Sample Tweet: @factomproject is the #blockchain truth engine. #factomxmas #bitcoin #fintech #startup

The above is only an example you should Tweet your own ideas, pics, slogans, etc... How and when do I receive my prize? The prize will be awarded after the end of the bounty. We will get in touch with the winners via a personal message on Twitter. Make sure you follow us so we can send you a direct message. We will then ask for an email address for further details.

Picking the Winner We will be monitoring all submissions for the duration of the bounty. We will choose between the ones that stand out for their originality, creativity, and best feedback (i.e. retweets, quotes, etc). We’ll also be retweeting and quoting the posts we like the most.

We are looking forward to see your submissions and we wish you all a very merry Xmas.

Thanks for being an awesome and supportive community. The Factom Foundation Team