BitPal June update

Hey! Here's a slightly delayed update for the last month of development of BitPal.

Things we've worked on:

• Firstly we reworked our GitHub repositories (again). We started with a general Elixir library, which would allow you to program against BitPal, but only from Elixir. This wasn't too beneficial, and it complicated the development while making it harder to follow the project, so now there's a single main repo for the BitPal server. See the issues and pull requests to get some sort of overview of how the project is coming along.

• I just merged a larger pull request with a basic API for the server. Apart from a basic REST API it also contains a websocket (or longpoll) API, where you'll get instant notification of invoice updates. For example an invoice tracks the status of a transaction when it's first seen, verified (a short timeout to check for any fast double spend attempts) and confirmed. (The support for websockets in Phoenix is great, and gives us a fast and modern API.)

• As usual, a bunch of low-level improvements and testing. Most of these concerns have been addressed and we have a pretty solid test suite covering everything from parsing Flowee's messages to endpoint API requests.

Going forward I plan to focus on:

• Fill out the API so we can write usable clients. I've rewritten the demo to use the API already, but there are some nice things that are missing (such as proper error messages and authentication).

• Make as many things as possible configurable (such as number of confirmations, xpub etc). Ideally this should be possible via a web interface, but as a start we'll retrieve it from a text based config file.

• Documentation.

And some words about the Flipstarter funding. There's about a month left until our promised hours run out, and after that I have other work commitments I need to focus on. I'll still work on this project after that, but the pace will be slower come August.