Some people have requested more insight into what is going on in Hush development so this memo aims to improve that situation. These dev updates may or may not happen on a regular basis, depending on if they are seen as useful.
Hush 3.9.3 "Lateral Larvacean" was recently released. It adds support for Tor v3 and i2p networking via BIP155 being ported from BTC to HUSH. This is also known as "addrv2". The reason for this change is because originally Tor v2 addresses were shorter and happen to fit inside the P2P messages that full nodes send to each other about which nodes they are connected to.Since the Tor network deprecated Tor v2 due to security bugs and upgraded to Tor v3 these addresses became much longer and no longer fit in these P2P messages, meaning that full nodes could no longer tell each other about Tor v3 nodes they were connected to. i2p addresses have always been long and never fit inside those P2P messages, so BIP155 adds support for i2p for the first time. To address these issues BTC Core added BIP155 in 2020 and now that has finally landed in HUSH, so you can once again use Tor with a Hush full node and now, for the first time, you can also use i2p. HUSH now has seed nodes for both Tor v3 and i2p networks, so if your node knows how to connect to them, it will be able to find peers over those networks. Thanks to the various Hush team members that run seed nodes to help the network run.
Additionally in 3.9.3 there are two new RPCs which node operators may find useful. "getrescaninfo" tells you info about a current rescan, including what percentage complete it is. This is much more convenient than searching for this data in debug.log. There is also "abortrescan" which will abort a current rescan if one is happening. This is an extremely useful RPC in case you accidentally started a rescan (possibly for all-time) which could take hours or days to complete. Previously there was no good way to stop a rescan, except forcefully killing a node and risking disk or wallet corruption. This RPC should be especially useful for nodes with large wallets, where rescans take a very long time.
For users of Hush Smart Chains, 3.9.3 fixes some bugs in the RandomX mining process, which is used by DragonX for instance. All DragonX miners should update to 3.9.3 and anyone wanting to create an HSC should use 3.9.3 .
So far we have found one bug in the 3.9.3 release, which only affects solo miners or mining pools using the stratum pool feature of hushd. When BIP155 support was merged, the `stratumallowip` feature was broken if a netmask is used, such as "-stratumallowip=192.168.1.0/24". It has been fixed on the dev branch. If this bug affects you, workarounds including specifying "-stratumallowip" multiple times to list specific IP addresses, using the dev branch, or contacting Hush devs on Telegram to ask for a binary of the dev branch.
Hush developers are currently in the process of making a release of SilentDragon (SD) and a new release of SilentDragonLite (SDL) just came out. One large change will be that support for our old android app SilentDragonAndroid (SDA) is being removed. That is the app that requires "pairing" to a wallet via websockets. We now have a new SDA which does not require pairing, it is a "lite wallet" that talks to a lite wallet backend server, which is much easier to use. Since the old SDA is deprecated and no longer supported, the SilentDragonWormhole is also no longer supported, since it was only needed to allow devices on different networks to pair with each other.
SDL has many new features and bugfixes in the just released Mythical Coelacanth v1.5.3 , a few will be described here.
SD also has a huge number of new features and bugfixes coming in the next release, a few are described here:
Recently Hush released a lite wallet Android app called SilentDragonAndroid to replace our old Android app (of the same name). The old app requires pairing to a desktop wallet of SD or SDL, the new app can be used solely with any compatible Android device. The Hush team recommends downloading SDA directly from our website, not an "app store". The latest SDA is currently not submitted to any app store. We will not be submitting SDA to the Google app store because Google now requires backdoor access to the app, which allows them to modify the app on their app store without telling anybody. "Official" app stores should be considered backdoored honeypots of surveillance.
A direct download of the new SDA can be found here . This requires changing the default setting in Android to allow installing from unknown sources. It would be nice to add SDA to F-Droid but there are some technical issues that need to be solved before that happens.
-- Duke Leto