Replies to Eran's questions

--- tags: ZCash --- Replies to Eran's questions === Hi Eran, Thank you for your indepth feedback! Replying to your questions: ---- ### Q. Will the software be open-source, including the monitoring scripts and the essential instructions for how to install and run them? 1. All code will be open source under MIT license. 2. We will provide in depth installation instructions. --- ### Q. For how long do you commit to running the public web service (under the current 31 ZEC funding request)? There seems to be an expectation mismatch on the funding request: 1. We mention in the proposal that $3500 is the development cost. 3. The server hosting cost is $890/annum which is not included in the development cost. Though we mention the same point in the proposal, in hindsight we should have added that cost to the total proposal's cost. 4. We also forgot to include: * cost of buying the domain. We propose buying https://zcashservicestatus.info which is available for $4/year. * SSL cost: $8/year. Extra cost that was not included: $901. Hence total cost of shipping the proposal = $4402. Irrespective of the notion that we would be submitting followup proposals around extending the monitoring service dashboard, we would be: * Maintaining the system actively for the next 3 months. That means bug fixes if any with the specs mentioned in the current proposal. * For 1 year: support if the system goes down. * Since reality may be very different at the end of one year (websites archived, communities/exchanges API may change, new services being added into categories, new categories being added etc.), we would like to submit followup proposals to accomodate these changes, but we shoudn't be held accountable for it if we aren't able to do so. Since we can't change funding request at this time: * Should we let it be and then cover the extra cost in the followup proposal? * Or resubmit this proposal by changing the funding request? --- ### Q. Will the dashboard include just the current status, or also historical status (e.g., seeing past downtimes of various services)? * In this proposal, we will maintain 7 day log retention. * In storing any kind of logs: * We took an approximation that logs would come around 50 GB/month. * We reviewed costing of S3 and EBS and found S3 to be much cheaper and more functionality rich. * And hence an extra storage cost of $300/year would have to be paid to store logs. * We thought of filtering logs and storing only downtimes but that is also infeasible. And hence if the community wants historical logs, we can deliver that in followup proposals. --- ### Q. Will the information (at least the current status) be publicly accessible by a programmatic API, in addition to rendered HTML? * Not in this proposal. * We can deliver API support in followup proposals. --- ### Q. Regarding the monitoring of exchanges, since you're already checking the spot price, I suggest adding some sanity check (e.g., does it deviate more than 10% from the median?), at least for common trading pairs like ZEC-USD and ZEC-BTC. (Doing this comprehensively would may be good for a follow-up proposal.) That makes sense! * In this proposal we will be making sanity check for price deviation > 10% from the median for the following trading pairs: * ZEC/USD * ZEC/BTC * Graph Specs: * Graph Name: Price Deviation for <trading pair> * Axis Specs: * X axis: time instance. * Y axis: absolute percentage change w.r.t to median * A fixed parrallel line to X axis at Y = 10%. * Any exchange's spot price which deviates more than 10% from the median at time `t` is represented by coordinates (`t`, `price>10%`) * Users will easily be able to spot from a glance that which exchange's are deviating a lot from the median. --- ### Q. I think https://minezcash.com/ can be ommitted, it is now archived and no longer updated (see https://minezcash.com/new-website-zcashcommunity-com/). Noted. --- ### Q. For the next group of monitored services, I suggest block explorers. They're essential infrastructure, and might be even easier to monitor than exchanging. Understood. ---- ## Upcoming Proposals The next proposal(s) will involve: * API support. * Historical Logs Support. * Exchanges: * Support rest of the exchanges: * AirTM * Coinsave * Coinut * Coinjar * Coinrail * CoinRoom * Gopax * Litebit * OKCoin * The Rock Trading * VALR * Upbit * Support rest of the trading pairs: * ZEC/BNB * ZEC/ETH * ZEC/PAC * ZEC/TUSD * ZEC/USDC * ZEC/USDT * More sanity checks: * Spot Price not fluctuating for more than 50% in 5 consecutive transactions at each exchange. * Blockchain Explorers Monitoring. Have made the proposal more explicit and defined in outcomes here: https://hackmd.io/@OsV2CnDyR46YOzx6dlMSow/By7koHLZH