Wow, Flo has been on a tear lately, it's nice to share updates with a bullish crowd
Note: I'm not gonna cover everything we've been working on, if you want to learn more, your best bet is probably to come join our slack here:
http://dloaslack.bitspill.net/1) More media types
We're still ironing out the kinks in regards to how some media types work in the "browser" application, but the "publisher" application now supports the following additional media types:
Movie
Book
Podcast
Thing
HTML
So, if you have media of any of those types you've been waiting to publish, the library is now ready for you
Publish here:
https://alexandria.io/publisher/2) Coinbase buy widget (US dollars via debit/credit cards!)
We are the #4? #5? project to be granted access to Coinbase's buy widget, which allows American bank card holders to make instant purchase of Bitcoin with their debit or credit card even if they don't have a coinbase account. Transactions must be for a minimum of $1, and non-account holders are limited to $5 per day and $50 in their lifetime - after that point they are asked to create an account with Coinbase to make further purchases.
This function is integrated in a few limited areas at the moment:
a) in Tradebot, which you can use as a publisher if you wish to purchase a small amount of Florincoin tokens to use for publishing - if you create a new wallet using
https://alexandria.io/publisher/ and then start the process of registering a publisher address without any tokens in your wallet, it will complain that you need "At least one Flo in your wallet" and then automatically load Tradebot. You can then either send BTC to the address provided to receive some Flo, or you can click the nice big blue "Buy Bitcoin with Coinbase" button, which will let you purchase between $1-$5 of BTC which it will automatically send to tradebot, and a few moments (or minutes) later, you'll receive Flo.
b) in Paywall, which is built into our "browser" application, which means when you come across an artifact with a purchase price between $1-$5, you'll have the option of using the buy widget. One good example can be seen when looking at Imogen Heap's "Tiny Human":
https://alexandria.io/browser/#/6e0bca1d8d4d24b41e24780e327e31631d864f2dc16081b7b17a7f929b9bdbf2If you click the "$0.015 To Play" button, you are presented with the a paywall that provides a QR code and address to pay via Bitcoin, but when you click the "$1 to Buy" button, you also get the option to use the Coinbase buy widget.
c) Note: We will be attaching the Coinbase widget to a hosted BTC wallet as well, in order to support direct payments from a logged-into wallet instead or relying entirely on QR codes and users' mobile wallets. First we need to select one to integrate into the "browser" application (by that i mean
https://alexandria.io/browser, just to be clear), so if you have particularly strong feelings about an open source bitcoin web wallet you think we should be considering, let us know (requirements: zero-knowledge, relevant foss license).
3) Updated URLs n stuff:
We've been doing some housekeeping and organizing, and some old links may have broken, so for clarity's sake, here's where stuff can be found:
https://api.alexandria.io/pool/ = Just a super basic pool at the moment, but will be a part of a specific security mechanism in the future
https://florinsight.alexandria.io/ = Insight-based explorer
https://explorer.alexandria.io/ = Florincoin-specific explorer designed for browsing tx-comments
https://flovault.alexandria.io/ = zero-knowledge hosted wallet for Florincoin
https://api.alexandria.io/docs/ = API documentation for most of our project's public endpoints (more coming soon)
4) Shared effort
"Why reinvent the wheel if your innovation is the rubber in the tire?"
Since a number of other projects have started working on the 'media distribution using blockchain technology' concept, we've been focusing a lot over the past year on how to ensure that all of this effort is as collaborative and complimentary as it can be, rather than being unnecessarily competitive as a default. Since our true competitor is simply the concept of centralized control of media distribution, and some deep pocketed entities have strong interests in preventing that paradigm from being disrupted, we do, of course, need to be somewhat strategic about how we publicly discuss and announce things like this, so we are keeping these details rather close to the chest. I mention it here, however, so that if any of you are working on a similar project, or if you are focused on delivering just one piece of the overall service involved in a decentralized media distribution eco system, you are invited to join the larger collaborative effort by getting directly in touch with myself either here via DM or in our slack channel via DM (my username in our slack channel is @devonjames).
Thank you all for your interest and support in this project - while on its surface Alexandria is about enabling artists to get paid more fairly for their work, for me personally it is also a tool that i hope will soon help us, as a species, to be better informed about the world around us, and maybe even help to prevent the next war. Fingers crossed, after all i hope we can all agree that its a worthwile goal, even if it does seem out of reach right now.
