ActorForth: Keeping BCH Infrastructure strong!

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Fundraising

The campaign has been funded: 4988....430d

Recipient

Contributors

  • 85%
    BCH_sun
    25.35 BCH
  • 15%
    toorik
    4.65 BCH

History

In 2020 our dev group was building a few systems that integrated with Bitcoin Bash. We quickly recognized that the infrastructure out there was, frankly, incredibly poor & unreliable. So we invested in a big way (to date over USD $300,000 that we can account for - reality is significantly higher) and built the BCH Dev Suite in an effort to make it viable for dev teams trying to get into crypto to be able to build their own BCH infrastructure for local development, testing, or even production. We ourselves deployed the system into production in mid-2020.

For our commercial project, we needed an extension to the BCH protocol and kicked off the effort for the Multiple OP_RETURN CHiP which was one of the earlier CHiP efforts to actually become a standard and also serves partly as a foundation to Jason's incredible CashTokens CHiP the following year.

By Q1 2021, however, Bitcoin.com announced the end-of-life of their rest.bitcoin.com service which we and a great deal of the BCH dev community depended upon. Naturally we set off to build a complete API compatible replacement to replace it as well as some internal dependencies which Bitcoin.com had never open sourced. This begat the necessity and continued operations of rest.bch.actorforth.org/ for which this Flipstarter has been launched.

Since then the service has been running pretty much non-stop even though our company pivoted and the product we had which used BCH and this service went dormant by September that same year. It remains our hope that the BCH community remain strong and not lose this asset.

Who We Are

Today we are known as BiggestLab.io but at the time of getting into the BCH space we were known as BiggestFan Productions - developers of a multi-way live streaming platform, an associated NFT-based ticketing system, and a BCH tipping capability amongst other interesting things. You can see a video of one of our multi-way live performances where tipping the performers via BCH was demonstrated here - Young Wolf Live w/BCH Tipping. Via this company and product development cycle we were heavy participants in the BCH community which we still have a strong affinity for and would love to keep an active participation.

The principles of the company founded Proteus Technologies and ProteusOps which were sold in 2018 having been founded in Bangkok in 2008. So we have a long history of building highly scalable and highly reliable systems.

We created the ActorForth organization to keep our Open Source software non-commercial which is where we put all our BCH infrastructure projects. Through this group we also provided code improvements into various other BCH Open Source projects.

What We'll Do

rest.bch.actorforth.org/ needs some love & attention to bring it up to our standards and make it even better and more performant than before. Funding this Flipstarter will guarantee its availability on improved server infrastructure for another year and also fund the necessary software improvements to keep it compatible with the latest BCH infrastruture. All of the code we've built for BCH infrastructure has been released as Open Source and will continue to be so.

We have additional stretch goals to make further improvements. If we can hit $40,000 we can add capabilities like persistent streaming event subscriptions via web-sockets so users don't have to keep polling. If you have additional requests they can be made by opening a BCH DevSuite Issue.

It is critical to us that any project we're involved with have high standards and a reliable sustainable SLA so it's safe to be a dependency for commercial development. Supporting this Flipstarter is an easy and inexpensive way of keeping the quality of BCH infrastructure high so commercial vendors can afford to build on Bitcoin Bash. We appreciate your help in keeping this goal alive.

About

The rest.bch.actorforth.org/ service needs your help to continue operating! If this flipstarter is not successful, rest.bch.actorforth.org/, is going to go end-of-life on December 31st, 2024.

rest.bch.actorforth.org/ has been operating as a free service since early 2021. However, usage loads and lack of funds to maintain & extend it have recently resulted in random short term outtages. Since we no longer have a commercial use for the service ourselves and without increased server capacity and code updates the system is unable to maintain a responsible SLA, we cannot justify its continued operation and will have to shut it down unless friends are willing to help cover the costs of its operations and maintenance.

We haven't required authentication or registration for the services usage and have been operating it at no cost to the BCH community for 3 years in response to Bitcoin.com cancelling their original Bitcoin Bash API. So we don't actually know who our users are outside of the IP addresses that show up in the logs.

The current usage has been pushing the CPU utilization to over 400% commonly. It handles between 6,000 - 10,000 requests per hour peaking at 275 requests per minute during our last sample. One of the issues is some ad hoc and common queries are rather expensive and getting more popular. During this last usage sample we had 171 unique IP addresses with 25 addresses responsible for the bulk of the traffic. We estimate the cost of operating the service and giving it at least two necessary development upgrades during 2025 to be about $16,000/year.

If you are a user of the service or you want to ensure that the service remains available and viable for Bitcoin Bash developers please consider contributing! We'd like to be able to continue it's operations and none of these costs include the costs of our staff keeping things running - just the hosting and development costs. We'll keep covering the operations labor but we have high standards for our own infrastructure and we can't justify the investment required to meet our operational standards for a service we ourselves are not commercially benefiting from.