Meetings: add 2018-07-05

Author: harding

_includes/references.md

@@ -7,10 +7,12 @@
 [Bryan Bishop]: https://github.com/kanzure
 [BtcDrak]: https://github.com/btcdrak
 [Chris Stewart]: https://github.com/Christewart
+[Clark Moody]: https://github.com/clarkmoody
 [Cory Fields]: https://github.com/theuni
 [David Harding]: https://github.com/harding/
 [Eric Lombrozo]: https://github.com/codeshark
 [Eric Voskuil]: https://github.com/evoskuil
+[Gleb Naumenko]: https://github.com/naumenkogs
 [Glenn Willen]: https://github.com/gwillen
 [Gregory Maxwell]: https://github.com/gmaxwell
 [Gregory Sanders]: https://github.com/instagibbs
@@ -52,6 +54,7 @@
 [Suhas Daftuar]: https://github.com/sdaftuar
 [Tadge Dryja]: https://github.com/T909
 [Tom Harding]: https://github.com/dgenr8
+[Varunram Ganesh]: https://github.com/Varunram
 [Warren Togami]: https://github.com/wtogami
 [Wladimir van der Laan]: https://github.com/laanwj
 [Zooko Wilcox]: https://github.com/zooko

_posts/en/meetings/2018-07-05-meeting.md

@@ -0,0 +1,232 @@
+---
+title: IRC meeting summary for 2018-07-05
+lang: en
+permalink: /en/meetings/2018/07/05/
+name: 2018-07-05-meeting
+layout: page
+type: meetings
+version: 1
+---
+{% include toc.html %}
+{% include references.md %}
+
+- View this week's log on [BotBot.me][bbm log] or [MeetBot (part 1)][mb log1] and [MeetBot (part 2)][mb log2]
+- Meeting minutes by MeetBot [part 1][mb minutes1] and [part 2][mb minutes2]
+
+*MeetBot minutes and logs are split into two parts this week because
+the initial meeting chairperson had to leave mid-meeting.*
+
+---
+
+Topics discussed during this weekly meeting included what pull requests
+members of the project would like reviewers to focus on during the
+upcoming week (especially in light of the upcoming feature freeze for
+Bitcoin Core 0.17), alternating the time of the weekly meeting, and
+reducing the default minimum relay fee.
+
+## High priority for review
+
+**Background:** each meeting, Bitcoin Core developers discuss which Pull
+Requests (PRs) the meeting participants think most need review in the
+upcoming week.  Some of these PRs are related to code that contributors
+especially want to see in the next release; others are PRs that are
+blocking further work or which require significant maintenance (rebasing)
+to keep in a pending state.  Any capable reviewers are encouraged to
+visit the project's list of [current high-priority
+PRs][].
+
+**Discussion ([log][log hipri]):** Wladimir van der Laan stared the
+discussion by saying, "looks like there is only one thing left:
+[#12196][]," which adds a `scantxoutset` RPC method.  He then added,
+"reminder that the [0.17 feature freeze][#12624] is 2018-07-16, so in
+roughly a week."  After that date, contributors are discouraged from
+proposing PRs containing new features for the upcoming 0.17 release so
+that everyone can focus on finding and eliminating any bugs or other
+misbehaviors prior to release.
+
+With that deadline approaching, meeting participants suggested the
+following PRs be added to the high priority list:
+
+- **[#13547][]:** Make `signrawtransaction` give an error when amount is
+  needed but missing.  Suggested by AJ Towns and supported by Pieter
+  Wuille.
+
+- **[#12458][]:** Enforce that amount is provided for `signrawtransaction` prevtxs.
+  Suggested by Towns and supported by Wuille.
+
+- **[#13072][]:** Update `createmultisig` RPC to support segwit .
+  Suggested by Towns and supported by Wuille.
+
+- **[#11658][]:** During IBD, when doing pruning, prune 10% extra to
+  avoid pruning again soon after.  Suggested by Sjors Provoost.
+
+- **[#13557][]:** [BIP174][] PSBT serializations and RPCs.  Requested or
+  supported by Van der Laan, Wuille, Andrew Chow, and Gregory Maxwell.
+
+- **[#13298][]:** Net: Random delays *per network group* to obfuscate
+  transaction time.  Suggested by Gleb Naumenko, clearly supported by
+  Maxwell, and possibly supported by Wuille.  
+
+- **[#13414][]:** Support Gitlab API in github-merge.py.  Requested by
+  r-f, but mentioned as probably not relevant to Bitcoin Core 0.17 by
+  Van der Laan.
+
+**Conclusion:** all PRs mentioned above except the last, #13414, were
+added to the high-priority list.
+
+## Alternating meeting time
+
+**Background:** the weekly Bitcoin Core meeting is held at the same time
+each week, Thursdays at 19:00 UTC.  Converted to local time by AJ Towns
+(using northern hemisphere daylight savings time), this corresponds to
+the local times:
+
+| UTC   | NYC   | LAX   | Sydney | Tokyo | India | Europe |
+|-------|-------|-------|--------|-------|-------|--------|
+| 19:00 | 15:00 | 12:00 | 05:00  | 04:00 | 00:30 | 21:00  |
+
+Those times are particularly inconvenient for Bitcoin Core contributors
+located in Oceania and East Asia.
+
+**Discussion ([log][log time]):** Sjors Provoost requested the topic and
+introduced it with a suggestion, "my suggestion would be something
+trivial, e.g. alternate by 12 hours every week."
+
+Some meeting participants had concerns about that time or about the
+confusion resulting from alternating meeting times, although Wladimir
+van der Laan noted that, "The problem is that the people in favor of [a
+different] time will likely not be here now, [so] it's unfair."
+
+Towns suggested "a three-phase cycle of 8 hours ought to make everyone
+able to attend 2 of 3 meetings :-/".  After the meeting, Towns would
+provide the following map of such a potential schedule:
+
+| UTC   | NYC   | LAX   | Sydney | Tokyo | India | Europe |
+|-------|-------|-------|--------|-------|-------|--------|
+| 03:00 | 23:00 | 20:00 | 13:00  | 12:00 | 08:30 | 05:00  |
+| 11:00 | 07:00 | 04:00 | 21:00  | 20:00 | 16:30 | 13:00  |
+| 19:00 | 15:00 | 12:00 | 05:00  | 04:00 | 00:30 | 21:00  |
+
+**Conclusion:** it was ultimately suggested that someone create a poll
+to help find which meeting times would be acceptable to the different
+contributors, and Cory Fields agreed to manage the poll.
+
+## [Reducing the default] min relay fee
+
+**Background:** Bitcoin Core won't accept transactions into its memory
+pool (mempool) unless they pay a minimum fee of 0.00001000 BTC per
+virtual kilobyte (vKB), sometimes written as 1 satoshi per byte (1
+sat/B).  This minimum fee level was set several years ago when the price
+per bitcoin (in USD terms) was about 1/10th what it is now, and so it
+may be too high---especially since nodes have recently rarely seen more
+than a few blocks worth of transactions in their mempools.
+
+Bitcoin Core also has a separate setting for minimum incremental relay
+fee that helps prevent abuse of the replace-by-fee mechanism but which
+interacts with the minimum relay fee.
+
+**Discussion ([log][log min relay fee]):** a [discussion on Twitter][min
+relay twitter] was referenced that suggested the minimum relay fee
+should be reduced or, ideally, eliminated.  Gregory Maxwell said, "our
+infrastructure is setup to have a minimum.  The amount of relay spam per
+dollar tends to infinity as the fee goes to zero."
+
+Pieter Wuille noted that the "minimum relay fee has limited impact,
+because if the transaction rate goes up as a result [of low fees],
+dynamic feerate kicks in."  That increases the feerate up to the level
+where newly-received transactions are only accepted if they pay a feerate
+competitive with the cheapest transaction currently in the mempool.
+
+However, Wuille mentioned that the related incremental relay fee has to
+be set to a sane amount to prevent node bandwidth from being abused.
+
+IRC user Booyah mentioned that, "there are wallets like Mycelium that
+sometimes miscalculated and when preparing a 1 sat/B transaction, end up
+with 0.97.. sat/B actual transaction and can not broadcast it
+currently."  AJ Towns confirmed that Xapo had a similar bug and
+described why it happened: "the signatures were slightly bigger than
+[the wallet] estimated, and [so the] 1 sat/B target ended up at
+0.9something sat/B and wouldn't propagate."
+
+Meeting participants agreed that there's nothing to do to fix that.  As
+Luke Dashjr said, "if [the minimum relay fee] was 0.5 sat/B, they'd end
+up [paying] 0.49."
+
+Dashjr suggested that the developers not make any changes and instead
+let users campaign amongst themselves to encourage changing the value.
+But Wuille noted that setting the value low has a downside related to
+[BIP152][]: "it reduces compact block relay efficiency, though.  Node
+operators generally have an incentive to pick the same values as
+miners."
+
+Related to trying to develop a design that has no minimum relay fee,
+Maxwell said, "Trying to make things work minrelayfeeless is probably
+not worth the effort.  There is a bunch of stupid behavior that having a
+low but non-zero minimum avoids."
+
+**Conclusion:** Maxwell said, "I'll PR something around halving it."
+
+## Comedic relief
+
+{% highlight text %}
+<gmaxwell> probably rather than discussing this here 
+           someone should go make some proposals (including 
+           times in common timezones).
+<cfields> those annoying doodle availability polls handle
+          this really well.
+<sipa> cfields just volunteered? :)
+{% endhighlight %}
+
+## Participants
+
+
+| IRC nick        | Name/Nym                  |
+|-----------------|---------------------------|
+| achow101        | [Andrew Chow][]           |
+| aj              | [Anthony Towns][]         |
+| booyah          | booyah                    |
+| cfields         | [Cory Fields][]           |
+| clarkmoody      | [Clark Moody][]           |
+| gmaxwell        | [Gregory Maxwell][]       |
+| luke-jr         | [Luke Dashjr][]           |
+| nmnkgl          | [Gleb Naumenko][]         |
+| phantomcircuit  | [Patrick Strateman][]     |
+| promag          | [Joao Barbosa][]          |
+| provoostenator  | [Sjors Provoost][]        |
+| Randolf         | [Randolf Richardson][]    |
+| r-f             | [r-f](https://github.com/rfree-d) |
+| sipa            | [Pieter Wuille][]         |
+| Varunram        | [Varunram Ganesh][]       |
+| wumpus          | [Wladimir van der Laan][] |
+
+## Disclaimer
+
+This summary was compiled without input from any of the participants in
+the discussion, so any errors are the fault of the summary author and
+not the discussion participants.  In particular, quotes taken from the
+discussion had their capitalization, punctuation, and spelling modified
+to produce consistent sentences.  Bracketed words and fragments, as well
+as background narratives and exposition, were added by the author of
+this summary and may have accidentally changed the meaning of some
+sentences.  If you believe any quote was taken out of context, please
+[open an issue](https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoincore.org/issues/new)
+and we will correct the mistake.
+
+[bbm log]: https://botbot.me/freenode/bitcoin-core-dev/msg/101804501/
+
+[mb minutes1]: http://www.erisian.com.au/meetbot/bitcoin-core-dev/2018/bitcoin-core-dev.2018-07-05-19.00.html
+[mb minutes2]: http://www.erisian.com.au/meetbot/bitcoin-core-dev/2018/bitcoin-core-dev.2018-07-05-19.22.html
+[current high-priority PRs]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/projects/8
+
+
+{% assign log1 = "http://www.erisian.com.au/meetbot/bitcoin-core-dev/2018/bitcoin-core-dev.2018-07-05-19.00.log.html" %}
+{% assign log2 = "http://www.erisian.com.au/meetbot/bitcoin-core-dev/2018/bitcoin-core-dev.2018-07-05-19.22.log.html" %}
+[mb log1]: {{log1}}
+[mb log2]: {{log2}}
+[log hipri]: {{log1}}#l-9
+[log time]: {{log1}}#l-70
+[log min relay fee]: {{log2}}#l-24
+
+[min relay twitter]: https://twitter.com/orionwl/status/1014829318986436608
+
+{% include link-to-issues.md issues="12196,12624,13547,12458,13072,11658,13557,13298,13414" %}