11,500 BCH, Languages, Social Media, Accountability, Easy Editor, Better Safety, ...

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2 years ago

It's fantastic, amazing and humbling to see how the Flipstarter community is methodically making decentralized crowdfunding real. When I started down this road with Lighthouse years ago, the Flipstarter community is what I imagined and hoped it would eventually look like. The cryptocurrency world sadly has many projects that are hype over substance, but I believe that when the history of this time is written it'll be the projects like Flipstarter that left the biggest long term impact. - Mike Hearn, 2022-03

11,500+ BCH, permissionless money raised with a decentralized tool that has no owner, no platform to be shut down or censored - it's something special. Much appreciation to everyone involved in creating Flipstarter, as well as to everyone campaigning and supporting what is important to you.

As an open source project, Flipstarter has been fortunate to get a series of significant updates recently. Now all the updates have been applied to the Flipstarter source code, the docker hub image and also the Digital Ocean easy-start. All are documented on the Flipstarter Site. We hope that the updates will benefit all campaigners and contributors.

These are the people making the long term project and the current round of updates possible:

  • Special mention for salemkode who attacked a long list of bounties on his own initiative, creating almost all of the updates discussed here, even doing some of them on a volunteer basis

  • Andrew Groot of Software Verde provided a code review service

  • Calin Culianu improved the automation of Flipstarter releases

  • Dagur volunteers as maintainer of the Electron Cash plugin

  • emergent_reasons of General Protocols volunteers as overall maintainer and organizer

  • farbi did a bounty to improve the labeling of pledges in Electron Cash history

  • freetrader improved the clarity and helpfulness of the plugin confirmation message

  • merc1er volunteers as maintainer of the Digital Ocean easy-start, and the Flipstarter site

  • sploit keeps the hosting alive for the Flipstarter site

  • uak added the Arabic translation

Plugin upgrade with improved safety and usability

Updated Plugin here. It is also linked from campaigns that use the latest Flipstarter release.

Now that Flipstarter established a level of trust among users, there is an alternate design on the way from Software Verde that has a better user experience and takes less extreme security measures. For those who prefer to continue using the plugin with Electron Cash, it has been improved to be safer and to have a better user experience:

  • Show a more helpful message before pledging that lets you confirm the receiving address.

  • Instead of a generic message in the transaction history, the message now includes the details from your pledge so it is easy to identify multiple campaigns.

Technical changes:

Arabic language

uak added the translation and salemkode made some fixes - now Flipstarter has an additional built-in language!

Technical changes:

Direct links to languages

salemkode did a significant update to the structure of Flipstarter code so that we can finally link directly to a specific language. For example:

  • Arabic: campaign.../ar

  • Chinese: campaign.../zh

  • English: campaign.../en

  • Japanese: campaign.../ja

  • Spanish: campaign.../es

Technical changes:

Real social media previews

Until now, Flipstarter links on social media would always result in a generic Flipstarter description instead of details about the actual campaign. salemkode fixed that along with the language changes above so that social media previews are now about the campaign itself, and in your chosen language.

Accountability link

As a simple update to encourage accountability on Flipstarter campaigns, salemkode added a new required item for each campaign: Where can people follow progress during and after a campaign?

Technical Changes

Easy to use editor for campaign creation

Until now, campaigners had to learn how to write up their campaigns using the markdown language. salemkode removed that barrier by adding not only an intuitive editor, but also improving Flipstarter so that all the features of markdown are available such as tables, linked images, and more.

Technical Changes

Improve safety and reliability of dependencies

The original Flipstarter code attempted to keep dependencies minimal for reasons of safety and long term reliability. One exception was the use of a library called Bitbox that is quite large, heavy and no longer maintained. salemkode did a lot of homework and investigation to figure out how to replace the remaining usages of Bitbox with Libauth, a library that perfectly fits Flipstarter's minimal and reliable design strategy.

The update to Libauth eliminated a whole group of issues going forward. Although the tweet below from Rosco Kalis is about a similar replacement in the CashScript project, it gives an idea of the level of simplification achieved:

Main technical change:

Related history of dependency fixes:

Want to make an improvement to Flipstarter?

Please do! Flipstarter is open source software, and there is a guide for contributions here.

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$ 1096.03
$ 1000.00 from @MarcDeMesel
$ 55.24 from @TheRandomRewarder
$ 13.30 from @BitcoinCashPodcast
+ 19
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2 years ago

Comments

A message from hearn. How cool!

Flipstarter team is doing great work.

Voluntary funding seems to be working.

$ 0.00
2 years ago

The only bad thing about flipstarter is in this type of situation. https://read.cash/@thecrud3reality/flipstarters-are-not-for-everyone-9afeaf76

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1 year ago