Memopress
Memo and BlockPress are two very popular on-chain social networks. They use a clever OP_RETURN prefixed protocol to write your actions to the blockchain. Later clients can read that data from the chain and recreate your account’s actions. This represents a truly decentralized and censorship resistant social network and it’s only possible on Bitcoin Cash.
Address UTXO
Sending transactions is at the heart of BCH. BITBOX has been able to send transactions for a while but w/ BITBOX Cloud and REST taking shape we wanted to revisit the steps for sending transactions to show how to best leverage the new functionality.
Explore
A block explorer is a critical piece of infrastructure that a BCH developer uses many times a day. They allow you to see the details about blocks, addresses and transactions. Today we’re happy to launch Explore—a BCH block explorer by BITBOX.
REST
BITBOX has so far focused on giving you tools to build great $BCH apps. However once you have a working app you need cloud infrastructure to deploy, host and scale your app. You need an ecosytem of add-ons to take your app to the next level. For that there’s BITBOX Cloud. Today we’re rolling out part 1 of BITBOX Cloud—REST.
BITBOX 4-21-18 Hackathon Details
Daily more and more developers are checking out BITBOX and we’re getting tons of positive feedback. The momentum is building and soon a whole new generation of Bitcoin Cash apps will be built w/ BITBOX. We’re hosting a hackathon to help on-ramp and network with developers all over EARTH.
v0.7.0
The Bitcoin Cash ecosystem is moving at light speed and the BITBOX team is working daily to keep up. BITBOX has now been downloaded 14,000+ times from 62 countries and the pace is accelerating. It’s clear that developers all over the EARTH are excited about Bitcoin Cash and are interested in leveraging it to build amazing applications.
MemoBCH Utility Methods
The pace of innovation in the Bitcoin Cash space is amazing. Each week we see new services launch which truly show the strength of the Blockchain. Yesterday Memo launched which is a “Decentralized on-chain social network built on Bitcoin Cash.”
Upcoming BITBOX Hackathons
The goal of BITBOX from day 1 has been to build the go-to toolset for $BCH app developers all over the EARTH. We’ve made a ton of progress and think it’s time to show BITBOX off to the world. With that in mind we’re hosting 2 upcoming hackathons where we’ll be giving away a total of 4 $BCH to the winning teams.
v0.6.0
Things are moving fast at BITBOX. Since launching 8 weeks ago it’s been downloaded over 10,000 times from 48 countries.
Mnemonics for fun and profit
Pssst. You want mnemonics? Oh yea we got mnemonics. We got all kinds of mnemonics.
BIP32 HD Wallets
Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets are the state of the art when it comes to generating, storing and managing Bitcoin Cash keypairs. They were described in BIP32 and BITBOX offers a suite of methods for creating and managing them.
Complete transaction setup
So you want to send $BCH transactions? Worthy goal. Follow this guide and soon the transactions will flow like the champaign of the Illinois countryside.
TransactionBuilder
The essense of Bitcoin Cash is all about sending and receiving transactions. The ability to move any amount of money to anyone on EARTH for nearly free is truly revolutionary. Today we’re very happy to introduce the TransactionBuilder class so developers can quickly send $BCH transactions from their apps.
v0.4.0
Having now worked daily w/ BITBOX for over a month it’s become obvious which original abstractions were clumsy and which are buckling under the weight of a growing codebase. bitbox-cli v0.4.0 represents a broad refactoring that makes the abstractions cleaner, the code more solid and the functionality vastly superior. v0.4.0 represents a leap forward for BITBOX.
BIP21
Bitcoin Cash is all about sending and receiving payments. BIP21 describes a way to encode payment request information such as address, amount, message etc as a URI. These URIs are a very popular way to share payment requests and you’ll often see them as links in a website or as QR codes. Today we’re releasing encodeBIP21 and decodeBIP21 to make it easy for your app to encode/decode BIP21 $BCH URIs.
BITBOX Explorer
Each time you start BITBOX it creates a fresh Bitcoin Cash blockchain just for you. This blockchain doesn’t connect to the actual $BCH network and only consists of blocks and transactions which you create locally so it’s quick and responsive. You can mine new blocks with the click of a button and the coinbase reward will go to the first account in your BITBOX wallet.
Mnemonic Word Lists
Bitcoin Cash is meant for people all over EARTH. Most of those people don’t speak english. That’s why today we’re releasing wordLists so you can generate mnemonics in 8 different languages to help spread $BCH to people all over the planet.
Extended Public Keys
Bitcoin Cash offers an unimaginably large number of addresses. This allows you to use a new address for every transaction which greatly increases your privacy. However most people keep their private keys offline in a hardware or paper wallet so it’s not conventient to generate new addresses for each transaction. Extended public keys (xpub) let you share or deploy only your xpub and applications can produce an infinite number of public keys and $BCH addresses, but can’t spend any of the $BCH sent to those addresses.
Utilities part 2
HD Wallets are at the heart of most Bitcoin Cash apps. Being able to quickly create them can let developers create more exciting $BCH apps quicker than ever. Today we’re releasing 7 new utility methods to let you quickly generate mnemonics, root seeds, master private keys, HD wallets and then to sign and verify messages w/ keys from that wallet.
Paper Wallet Generator
Paper wallets let you print public and private keys as QR codes on to a piece of paper which can be stored offline. They are a very quick and convenient way to store coins safely (as long as the paper doesn’t degrade) and are much cheaper than a hardware wallet while maintaining much of the security.
Utilities part 1
bitbox-cli recently added 3 new Objects full of utility methods to help you accelerate your $BCH workflow. The BitcoinCash methods convert between satoshis and whole units.
Import & Export
BITBOX recently underwent a large code refactor to port to Redux. This made us completely think out the state tree, remove any calls to this.setState(), create action types/creators and compose reducers w/ combineReducers and <Provider>. This change is completely under the hood and won’t affect the way BITBOX behaves nor will it introduce any breakages w/ your apps.
BITBOX Scaffolds
The goal of BITBOX is to accelerate how quickly $BCH devs can create their apps. W/ that in mind today we’re launching Scaffolds. This is a way to bootstrap a Bitcoin Cash application in under a minute.
Multiple Environments
Imagine you have a $BCH app which you’d like to deploy. However before doing that it seems like you should test it. BITBOX console lets you quickly switch between sending commands to your local instance or your full node running on the cloud. That way you can test your code locally before deploying to a remote server w/ production running $BCH node.
bitbox-cli
BITBOX aims to be the go-to toolset for $BCH developers. We want you to be able to run your code and tests against your BITBOX before deploying to live environments and aim for 100% Bitcoin Cash JSON RPC API coverage.
Sign & Verify
BITBOX enables you to cryptographically prove ownership of an address via signing messages. You can also verify that ownership of an address from another person.
Address Conversion
When Bitcoin Cash began as a fork of $BTC on Aug 1st 2017 it kept the legacy address format. This ended up causing quite a bit of confusion and resulted in lost funds as users accidentially sent $BCH to $BTC addresses and vice versa.
Account Creation
Bitcoin Cash wallets are really just collections of key pairs. Hiearchical Deterministic wallets are the state of the art for reliably creating and backing up collections of related keypairs. For more detail read Andreas’s in depth explation about how they work in Mastering Bitcoin chapter 5.
Hello EARTH!
The Bitcoin Cash ecosystem is growing quickly. People all over the EARTH are being drawn to the compelling original vision of frictionless and borderless money facilitated by on-chain scaling. The goal of BITBOX is to build a suite of tools which help accelerate the quality and quanity of applications built on top of the $BCH platform.