torusJKL / bitpic-lite

Instant bitpic.network powered by bitbus + bitFS

Bitpicbus

Bitpic powered by Bitbus

What is Bitpic?

Bitpic is like gravatar but on Bitcoin. It lets you associate your Paymail address with an on-chain image, thereby letting you take your avatar anywhere you go.

Learn more: https://bitpic.network/about

Install

Step 1. Get planaria token

First go to https://token.planaria.network/ and get a token.

Step 2. Add token to the app

Open the .env file and add your token there. Replace the <ADD YOUR PLANARIA TOKEN HERE> with your actual token:

TOKEN=<ADD YOUR PLANARIA TOKEN HERE>

Step 3. Run

Just run your app!

npm install
node index

and open http://localhost:3012

How Bitpicbus works

1. Bitbus: Instead of crawling every transaction from Bitcoin in order to filter out Bitpic protocol transactions, Bitpicbus sends a crawl query to Bitbus, and it instantly synchronizes your local machine with whatever you asked for.
2. BitFS: Instead of crawling all avatar image files to your local server and serving from your local machine, bitpic-bitbus simply stores the Bitfs URI. Then it creates a key/value database of paymail addresses pointing to the correspondng BitFS URI.
3. Web Server: Then the app also sets up a web server at port 3012, which is served instantly. The important part is the routing. Using the key/value database populated in step 2, it redirects all /u/<paymail> addresses to the corresponding BitFS URI. This is handy because users can instantly verify the authenticity by looking up the corresponding transaction ID on a block explorer.

Disclaimer

Bitpic-lite at this stage is meant as a demo and lacks certain features.

1. Currently bitpic-lite works only with images already mined on the blockchain.
2. Also it doesn't do persistent crawling. But this is not difficult to implement.
3. In the future may implement Bitsocket and mempool support