Fund raiser: Help fund Fulcrum 2.0

[cculianu]

Donate to Help Fund Fulcrum 2.0

Hello Fulcrum admins! I am respectfully asking if you can donate some sats to help fund Fulcrum 2.0 development.

What's going to be new in Fulcrum 2.0?

• New database format to guarantee atomicity and durability of the database. This means that... If Fulcrum is killed or crashes mid-synch, no database corruption will be possible. This closes issue Request for Update on Unresolved Database Corruption Issue (#41 and Related) #264 .
• Much faster synch times and block update times on account of a more efficient database format.
• Potentially: Also get rid of the huge txnum2txhash data file and/or split it up into multiple smaller files (for rsync compatibility for backups). See: Is it be possible to give txnum2txhash the same structure on disk as txhash2txnum? #93 (Thanks @hMsats for suggesting this!)
• Fulcrum's new database layout will now enable libsnappy and/or ZSTD compression; this should reduce disk space requirements while also improving performance in general (yes, it's sometimes faster to compress data slightly when saving it to disk than not). See: Add option to enable RocksDB ZSTD compression to save 15% storage space/IO #230

When is this work planned?

I would very much like to release Fulcrum 2.0 before the Summer of 2025.

I need funding to do it!

It's going to take many hours to do this work. I'd ideally like to raise about ~$10,000 USD to fund development, testing, and support.

BCH Donation Address

bitcoincash:qphax4s4n9h60jxj2fkrjs35w2tvgd4wzvf52cgtzc

BTC Donation Address

1BCHBCH6TXBaXyc5HReLBm1sNytBF2kkPD

Or, for anonymity you can donate to this BCH RPA address:

paycode:qygqyce24f7n6q2u36r8t332z5426ul78v7z0ynl6v9wlmk9tt28adksqgc0fzge8fk6ux8cj9tjvp8mkakvfzkgwqzj5h4n9tnfcpscsn7wxqqqqqqqzzmxze04

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Thank you!

-Calin

[0-100eth]

How much more would you need to build a GUI as well?

[cculianu]

How much more would you need to build a GUI as well?

What would go into the GUI? Like -- you just run the app from a GUI and you see its output and/or before running all the options are there to configure via GUI? And you can inspect runtime variables and stuff via GUI (the app keeps runtime variables that are only accessible via local HTTP port as JSON)?

[0-100eth]

How much more would you need to build a GUI as well?

What would go into the GUI? Like -- you just run the app from a GUI and you see its output and/or before running all the options are there to configure via GUI? And you can inspect runtime variables and stuff via GUI (the app keeps runtime variables that are only accessible via local HTTP port as JSON)?

I was thinking exactly that. Just a self contained app that the user can interface with config and monitor metrics ,health , connectivity , etc , just a cleaver way of doing data visualization as with my current setup Fulcrum is always running so if I have errors or issues there’s a lot of scrolling that I need to dig through the terminal when investigating. GUI does not have to be super crazy or anything but I’m sure something would be better than nothing. Thank you for consideration of my feedback.

[cculianu]

How much more would you need to build a GUI as well?

What would go into the GUI? Like -- you just run the app from a GUI and you see its output and/or before running all the options are there to configure via GUI? And you can inspect runtime variables and stuff via GUI (the app keeps runtime variables that are only accessible via local HTTP port as JSON)?

I was thinking exactly that. Just a self contained app that the user can interface with config and monitor metrics ,health , connectivity , etc , just a cleaver way of doing data visualization as with my current setup Fulcrum is always running so if I have errors or issues there’s a lot of scrolling that I need to dig through the terminal when investigating. GUI does not have to be super crazy or anything but I’m sure something would be better than nothing. Thank you for consideration of my feedback.

I'm considering it -- it would just be a ton of work. The hard part is in visualization of data that's a whole thing. Some people interface Fulcrum with grafana. @EchterAgo has a setup like that -- maybe he can chime in, if he's around, and point you to how he did his setup.

The thing is developing a GUI like that is a ton of work...

[ake-khada]

Thanks for doing this.

I donated between 500k-1mil sats. Hopefully, the community follows through.

[cculianu]

Thanks for doing this.

I donated between 500k-1mil sats. Hopefully, the community follows through.

Yay! Thank you kind sir! ❤

[hMsats]

Sounds great. Donated 0.015 btc, also for Fulcrum in general. Good luck with Fulcrum 2.0!

[cculianu]

Sounds great. Donated 0.015 btc, also for Fulcrum in general. Good luck with Fulcrum 2.0!

Oh man thanks. That was you? Received!

[sethforprivacy]

Hey @cculianu,

Thrilled that we're able to support your work in this way, as Cake Wallet has been a long-time user of Fulcrum it only makes sense that we'd give back to such a vital piece of software in the space! Donation sent via this TX, excited to see what you can do with the new funds in v2.0 :)

One additional thing I'd like to ask on (and this is not a "string" attached to the donation, to be clear!) is what your thoughts are on adding Silent Payment support for Bitcoin to Fulcrum? Cake would be happy to sponsor work on that (under reasonable terms, of course) and have started working with one of the spec authors recently who could help advise this addition in some capacity, as we're the only real wallet out with Silent Payment support at this time.

If that's interesting to you feel free to email me at [email protected] or on X (@sethforprivacy there as well) and we can chat further, but would be amazing to see Silent Payment indexing as a core part of Fulcrum which would greatly simplify our infra setup and make it much easier for self-hosters who already run Fulcrum to use their own indexer for Silent Payments!

[cculianu]

@sethforprivacy Thank you SO much! Received! W00!. Ok I am getting super close to my funding goal. Awesome. I actually am continuing work on this even today and hope to have Fulcrum 2.0 out by late spring (I predict 99% of the work will be in testing in various scenarios to ensure it's fast and reliable -- hence the conservative timeline I am envisioning -- that and I have a few conferences to attend in early May).

what your thoughts are on adding Silent Payment support for Bitcoin to Fulcrum?

I really want to add this! Note that BCH has a very similar (but annoyingly different) mechanism for doing silent payments so the major "pipes" are in place to do that already within Fulcrum -- just the implementation details differ.

I would very much like to add this. Let's talk about this further -- I plan on finishing my initial pass for Fulcrum 2.0 and then maybe we can add silent payments at the end of that (or as a subsequent release). It would be very useful to many people.

If that's interesting to you feel free to email me at [email protected] or on X (@sethforprivacy there as well)

I'll email you and/or contact you on X further when I get close to that point. Right now I'm just mired in the DB code and can't think clearly beyond that.. but I do want to add this support! I plan on thinking more deeply about that when I get to a good point with the DB code.

Would also be useful to just have someone to chat to about implementation details (probably stuff like how the Electrum protocol extensions for SP's should look).

[sethforprivacy]

@sethforprivacy Thank you SO much! Received! W00!. Ok I am getting super close to my funding goal. Awesome. I actually am continuing work on this even today and hope to have Fulcrum 2.0 out by late spring (I predict 99% of the work will be in testing in various scenarios to ensure it's fast and reliable -- hence the conservative timeline I am envisioning -- that and I have a few conferences to attend in early May).

what your thoughts are on adding Silent Payment support for Bitcoin to Fulcrum?

I really want to add this! Note that BCH has a very similar (but annoyingly different) mechanism for doing silent payments so the major "pipes" are in place to do that already within Fulcrum -- just the implementation details differ.

I would very much like to add this. Let's talk about this further -- I plan on finishing my initial pass for Fulcrum 2.0 and then maybe we can add silent payments at the end of that (or as a subsequent release). It would be very useful to many people.

If that's interesting to you feel free to email me at [email protected] or on X (@sethforprivacy there as well)

I'll email you and/or contact you on X further when I get close to that point. Right now I'm just mired in the DB code and can't think clearly beyond that.. but I do want to add this support! I plan on thinking more deeply about that when I get to a good point with the DB code.

Would also be useful to just have someone to chat to about implementation details (probably stuff like how the Electrum protocol extensions for SP's should look).

Looking forward to chatting more, and to deploying Fulcrum 2.0 when available! Sincerely grateful for your hard work, is critical to our user's experience with Cake Wallet and has been a core piece of infra I've run personally for years now.

Keep up the amazing work!

[leCoq42]

Why not apply for a grant (for example from OpenSats/HRF/Brink)?