New Proposal.... is #244
This proposal expires in a few days, to support the ongoing work, please head over to #244 and give that an upvote!
Support Proposal 244 on PeakD
Support Proposal 244 with Hivesigner
Support Proposal 244 on Ecency
TL;DR - The Next Proposal
- Asking for 6 months funding at 285 per day
- Funding to start in June
- I'm working on Hive and V4Vapp at least 6 hours per day, 5 days a week.
- Looking for paid assistance with Docker and devops especially security
Support Proposal 222 on PeakD
Support Proposal 222 with Hivesigner
Support Proposal 222 on Ecency
Primary Goals
- Containerize the entire operation of a Hive Lightning Bridge
- Work with other Hive projects to make Lightning and Hive interchangeable throughout our ecosystem
- Additions to the v4v.app website such as Lightning Addresses
- More promotion of Value 4 Value Podcasting with Hive as the back end
- @spknetwork integration for Lightning
- Explore ways of using escrow functions for larger transfers
The Story So Far
Podping
It started off with Podcasting 2.0. That led me to develop @podping which was the first project which the DHF funded. That is a quiet, growing success. It hasn't needed extra funding since it's original 60 day, HBD 7200 grant (it got a little less in the end) and most of those funds remain in the account, powered up and providing ongoing resource credits. I will give a separate update especially on the work going on around cross-app, live podcast notifications for podcasters "going live". This is a killer feature and Hive is at the core of it.
@v4vapp Lightning Hive Bridge
Previous two proposals
I put in the first proposal for the Hive Lightning Bridge in August 2021.
The second proposal began in January and is coming to an end in a few days in May 2022.
Results
The main thrust of the previous proposal was to get a two way bridge working between Hive and Lightning for small payments. I had budgeted and planned to outsource the creation of a public facing Lightning service I would need.
In the end I built almost all of this myself resulting in devoting considerably more time to the project than I had expected. I'm very happy I did and I have a much deeper understanding of Lightning because I did.
V4V Streaming Sats to Podcasts
This has continued and works well. All channels on @threespeak are video podcasts and increasingly some of the new Podcasting 2.0 compatible apps are dealing with video better.
Converting Hive into Sats.
Last time I reported that Hive worth around 2.1m Sats had been converted. I changed the back end recently, but only since that change in mid March, I've seen more than 5.3m Sats worth of Hive or HBD converted.
New: Sats into Hive
The new part which I built myself, is the ability to generate and pay a lightning invoice v4v.app/hive and have Lightning turn into Hive or HBD. This has been used more than a 100 times and for around 2m Sats. These aren't huge numbers yet, but there is growth in both transaction volumes and the number of new accounts using it.
Back end and cloud hosting
Over the last 4 months I've dramatically re-configured the back end to get ready for decentralisation and open sourcing. I've improved the accounting systems which will be necessary for anyone to run this service.
I switched from using a Lightning node at home to a cloud based one from Voltage and I also took a server from @privex in order to run the front facing website v4v.app and the all important back end API which is available right now for any Hive Devs who want to include Lightning in their Hive projects.
Lightning Addresses
I'm announcing here something which will get its own announcement soon: Lightning Addresses. This might look like an email address but if you put it into most of the newer Lightning Wallets: brianoflondon@v4v.app either by typing it in or snapping the QR code.
My website will generate these QR codes for you soon.
Reliability
V4Vapp services have become steadily more reliable and the earliest users who sometimes saw things go wrong will all attest I fixed problems very quickly and they tend not to re-occur. I've solved a lot of issues with making reliable payments on Lightning (which is a huge problem for the entire network). This is certainly made simpler for me by limiting transactions to 100,000 sats at a time, but it has necessitated a lot of work keeping Lightning nodes up and channels balanced.
I set myself a goal of being able to leave my home for 2 weeks and have all these services run without intervention until I came home. I was set up to VPN in and fix stuff and in the end I almost didn't have to.
Right up until the crypto market melted down on Thursday of last week almost everything ran well! Swaps happened in both directions and everybody was happy.
Then the Hive/BTC rate swung wildly outside of what had been normal and an emergency break I'd forgotten I put in suddenly came into force. I knew fixing this was going to be too much work for me to find and reverse from abroad and away from my main machine so I had to suspend the service for a day or so while I travelled home. Normal functions were restored a few hours after I got home.
The Next Proposal
- Asking for 6 months funding at 285 per day
- Funding to start in June
- I'm working on Hive and V4Vapp at least 5 hours per day, 5 days a week.
- Looking for paid assistance with Docker and devops especially security
Primary Goals
- Containerize the entire operation of a Hive Lightning Bridge
- Work with other Hive projects to make Lightning and Hive interchangeable throughout our ecosystem
- Additions to the v4v.app website such as Lightning Addresses
- More promotion of Value 4 Value Podcasting with Hive as the back end
- @spknetwork integration for Lightning
- Explore ways of using escrow functions for larger transfers
Containerize the entire operation of a Hive Lightning Bridge
This deserves some more discussion because it is the biggest technical challenge but the most important from the point of view of turning this into a project that matches Hive's approach to reasonable decentralisation.
My philosophical approach is not to have hundreds or even dozens of exchanges in the short term: but to have enough to avoid single point of failure. In some ways my thinking on this is in line with what the @threespeak team is doing with distributed CDN's, encoding and storage systems for video and other data.
At present I have three key components running in three locations all talking to each other:
- Lightning Node
- Website and API
- Hive and Lightning processing
The cloud Lightning node I'm using is run by Voltage but everything else I have designed and deployed. All my deployments so far run in Docker. The public web facing parts are on a @privex server and the part which watches the Hive and Lightning transactions is not directly open to the internet. The main website and api use a Docker version of Traefik. I knew nothing about any of this 12 months ago.
My goal over the next 6 months is to get this to as close to a single docker-compose up command as is possible. The Lightning node management will always be separate and demanding of a set of skills that have to be learned. My aim is to find one or two people willing to learn that skill and marry it up with my existing software: I will then shift to developing a command and control system within Hive so that if one of these bridges goes down, traffic is routed to others.
Thanks for everything so far
I must say again how grateful I feel to have all of you, my friends in the Hive community as my "bosses". I truly feel I work for all of the community. I believe I'm providing a valuable service to Hive which will increase the value of every part of the Hive ecosystem in ways great and small. It is so rewarding to be able to contribute and I'm so grateful the DHF is around to give me the space to work on this.
I do not take any votes for granted and I try to offer a service which many more people will want to use with service levels and reliability backed by my entire reputation. I will answer any questions or concerns and I take all suggestions on board.
The Future of Lightning and Hive
To conclude I just want to say a few words about Lightning. As I was writing this Michael Saylor, love him or hate him, just tweeted out the following:
#Bitcoin is the future of money. #Lightning⚡️ is the future of payments.
I agree with both those but I'll add that Hive is the future of Web 3.0 and the ownership of a digital presence.
I've written copiously on Lightning's issues, but it does have a massive groundswell of support right up to legal tender in El Salvador. It is developing the range of on/off ramps which no other crypto option seems to have. These are mostly in the US and a few other places for now, but with each new, easy way to get $20 of Lightning, we suddenly have new ways to use Hive and HBD in daily life.
Only Hive can give the security and censorship resistance of a proper blockchain with widely distributed infrastructure and token ownership: Lightning coupled with Hive provides a unique opportunity that the other high-fee projects can't take advantage of.
Once again thank you for your votes and support so far!
Timing note
I'm starting the new proposal after the first week of June. This is two weeks after my current one expires and three weeks from when I'm putting it up for votes.
Support Proposal 222 on PeakD
Support Proposal 222 with Hivesigner
Support Proposal 222 on Ecency
