Disclaimer
While I put as much effort as I reasonably could into ensuring the security, stability, and reliability of Bubble, I'm just a single person, and you shouldn't take what I say as absolute fact. I highly encourage you to audit the Bubble source code yourself before you use it in a production environment.
Introduction
I'm a huge supporter of open source, and digital ethics as a whole. As a part of that, I run a platform called V0LT where I develop hundreds of freedom respecting pieces of content ranging from software, to pictures, to 3D models. As a part of that digital ethics focus, I'm hugely interested in cryptocurrency, and the potential privacy, security, and freedom advantages it brings.
I consider V0LT my hobby, and whatever money I make in donations is significantly outweighed by the amount of money I put into V0LT. I enjoy programming, photo/video editing, 3D modeling, and other content production, and V0LT is simply my way of sharing what I make with the world. Making money is a nice advantage, but it's not what drives me.
However, I realized that for cryptocurrency to be useful and go mainstream, there would have to be a way for smaller scale developers like myself to monetize their work. That's why I created Bubble. While I personally don't put significant effort into making my website profitable, I still have the utmost respect for people who run businesses without losing focus on digital ethics. Bubble is designed to make the lives of those kinds of businesses and small scale developers as easy as possible.
As it stands right now, developers who want to accept payments for their software are required to do so using PayPal, Square, Stripe, or any number of other proprietary platforms. Even if they choose to use cryptocurrency, they're still forced to use platforms like BitPay, which are still proprietary, centralized, and contain a number of privacy concerns. The only other realistic option for most developers is to build their own system from scratch, and fix all of the issues that arise themselves. Not only is this very time consuming, but it encourages developers to move to proprietary, non-freedom respecting platforms like those described earlier.
Store Owner Experience
Businesses and developers who simply want to sell digital content in return for cryptocurrency shouldn't be forced to deal with the complexities of creating a storefront from scratch. This is where Bubble comes in. Bubble is completely open source, self hosted, well commented, and easy to get up and running. Content creators who want to sell their content for BitcoinCash just have to follow the instructions bundled with the source code, and they'll be able to quickly and easily get a highly customizable store front ready.
After the initial installation and set up of Bubble, content creators can add their products and their information to the product database, and Bubble will seamlessly and automatically generate a visually appealing, modern storefront. Bubble is fully modular, and will mesh with nearly any website set up, and allows developers to integrate their existing site account systems, content distribution systems, and informational webpages. Bubble alone offers plenty of configuration that allows developers to fine tune how their Bubble store looks, feels, and functions.
BitcoinCash boasts these features:
Privacy respecting
Non-JavaScript dependent
Modern, mobile friendly design
Well documented
Lightweight
Fully accessibility compliant
Easy to learn
Customer Experience
Not only is Bubble a great choice for store owners and content distributors, but its great for customers as well. Customers can shop confidently knowing that their personal information isn't being collected or distributed. Even customers who aren't familiar with BitcoinCash or even cryptocurrency as a whole are walked through the process step by step to ensure they aren't overwhelmed. Of course, developers should always do their best to make sure Bubble is properly configured, but in the event that a mistake is made and an error occurs, Bubble can quickly and easily inform customers of the error and allow them to report it via email.
Technical
One of the main advantages of cryptocurrency is the fact that it's completely decentralized. You don't have to trust any third party to verify your transactions. Why should this be any different for store owners and content creators? Bubble is written in PHP and has all of it's dependencies built right in. It doesn't need to reference any external resources, meaning it's completely self hosted and decentralized. As the owner of a Bubble store, the only person you have to trust with your transactions is yourself. This is in stark contrast to nearly every other payment provider on the planet, who requires your transactions go through a third party. Bubble remains true to the philosophy of cryptocurrency by keeping the power in the hands of math and code, not a company hundreds of miles away.
The lack of dependencies also makes Bubble very easy to set up. As long as you have Apache and a recent version of PHP installed, Bubble should basically be drag and drop to get up and running. Regardless, the extensive documentation makes it easy to walk through the process step by step, including the configuration.
Conclusion
If this all sounds like something that interests you, I encourage you to check it out at https://v0lttech.com/bubble.php. Of course, it's completely free to use, and doesn't contain advertisements of any kind. If you prefer, you can also find it on GitHub at https://github.com/connervieira/Bubble/.
This is a project I'm very passionate about and proud of, so I highly encourage you to get in touch if you have any comments, suggestions, or other feedback! You can find my contact information at https://v0lttech.com/contact.php.
