The BitBoost Team is continuing to develop version 1.4 of the Marketplace. As mentioned last time, we are moving a large portion of our data storage to IPFS (the Interplanetary File System), and today we’ll talk more about this.
One way to implement IPFS is to make each user’s computer into an IPFS node. This is not hard to do, and can be done in a way that is secure and transparent to the user. However, it does require that sellers keep their computers turned on and connected to the internet if they want their goods to remain available for purchase. (Alternatively, they can run their own IPFS node on a server, if they have the technical skills to do so.) While this is the approach that some other projects have taken, we decided right away that this is just not user-friendly and too much could go wrong with that approach, causing sellers to lose their listings.
The engineering challenge here is to develop a system that uses IPFS without requiring a seller to run an always-on IPFS node. For proprietary reasons we will not share the details of how we are doing it, but we believe we have found a creative solution and we are building it now for our next release.
Future planned developments within IPFS may make our solution redundant at some point, and we look forward to that day. In the meantime, we will iterate and improve on our solution so that our users have a marketplace they can use sooner rather than later.
In other news, you may have heard about Shapeshift’s recent decision to no longer process anonymous transactions, but instead require all of their users to have accounts. The current BitBoost Marketplace app uses Shapeshift for conversions from BTC to ETH. This function will no longer work as designed, and we are reviewing our options for replacing Shapeshift with another service that respects our users’ privacy. Look for a blog post with more information coming soon.
We are still planning to release version 1.4 in October.
Our list of tasks under active development is the same as our previous update, so we won’t list it again here. However, we can share with you some of the tasks and bugs that we have fixed over the last 2 weeks:
- task — Need additional contracts for storefront.
- task — Complete buy-sell process to use IPFS.
- bug — Seller doesn’t have the option “reject sale” for IPFS buy requests.
- bug — Purchase request placed for IPFS based item is not logged in My Purchases page.
- bug — IPFS item is doubled/tripled in View All.
- bug — Items listed on IPFS are listed in blockchain 2 days later.
- bug — Notification ‘Buy request received (IPFS)’ does not open any screen (Orders) when clicked.
- bug — Notification on IPFS items “Buy request received” has an extra notification attached.
- bug — Seller does not receive any buy request for IPFS based items.
- As you can see from this sampling, it has been a lot of work to make IPFS compatible with the app, but IPFS is necessary to make BitBoost Marketplace a viable option for our users. We will keep at it and update you in two weeks!
Originally published at www.bitboost.net on October 15, 2018.
