Hi all,

I've been so busy working on metaexchange that I've not had a chance to write a little bit about the technology behind it until now. You guys might find it interesting because it's got more in common with the design of ripple than shapeshift.io.

Metaexchange operation is divided up into two distinct parts:

*) API server
*) Market daemons

The API server provides the route between the customers and each market. The daemons are responsible for processing orders.

In itself this isn't that interesting, but what separates us from the norm is that metaexchange is designed to run multiple market daemons, and these daemons can be (and are) located anywhere in the world.

Each daemon directly holds funds necessary to serve the number of individual markets hosted within it. So, there is no one central point of failure, because we have multiple daemons in different locations.

This is great for our liquidity providers, who are essentially market makers, because it frees them from the counter-party risk associated with running their operations on a centralised exchange. By running a metaexchange daemon, they keep complete control over how their funds are stored, which gives them extra peace of mind. We supply them with orders via our API, they make a profit on the spread they offer and we charge a 0.3% fee per transaction to cover our own costs.

So, we're not decentralised, but we are distributed. Each daemon is essentially like a ripple gateway, except that instead of handing out IOU's they hand out bitAssets which have no counter-party risk associated with them.

If you like the idea of becoming a metaexchange node, please shoot me a PM - we are always looking to open up new markets

Cheers, Paul.

As I understand it, the only way to confirm you own a titan transaction is to decode the memo with your private key?

Is it possible to issue a different, read only, watcher key which would allow the recipient to see all transaction details, but not to actually spend any of the outputs?

I know light wallets are supposed to make this semi redundant, but to me titan is a cool feature to lose. In addition something like this could enable developers to build hack resistant wallets because you could simply not store any private keys in the wallet at all, and sign all transactions only on demand, so even if the physical hardware containing the wallet was stolen, the funds are still safe.

This sounds like a stupid idea at first glance (why not build a bitshares faucet, right?) but there is method here. Building a bitcoin faucet is trivial (there are ready made solutions, just install and go) and once you list it on the many, many aggregator sites you immediately (and I mean immediately - I have first hand experience) get upwards of 1000 hits / day for as long as it remains active.

These faucets are usually plastered with gaudy advertising to try and claw their investment back, but there is opportunity here to subsidise the cost with a delegate and advertise only bitshares.

Just my p2.

I've got a lot of problems with the RPC server lagging badly and failing to respond to requests in a timely fashion. There have been 40 odd RPC call timeouts in the last 10 minutes, with a 10 second timeout. There is no heavy lifting going on in the RPC calls, just simple stuff.

My wallet is open, unlocked and producing blocks.

What can I do?

It would be good to have the GUI wallet automatically understand when you paste a BTS address into the 'To' field that you want to send to a BTS address.

Any idea when this will work?

I know I can use the CLI, but for end users, this isn't a brilliant option.

Hi everyone, I'm cross-posting this here for better visiblity!

The metaexchange BTC->bitBTC gateway is live for testing!

Here is how to use this

* Import your bitcoin private keys into the bitshares wallet account that you want to use. The private keys must be compressed* (i.e. not starting with a 5, they look like this L4rK1yDtCWekvXuE6oXD9jCYfFNV2cWRpVuPLBcCU2z8TrisoyY1).

* Funds must be sent from a registered bitshares account

* use wallet_account_update_active_key to set one of your imported keys as the active key

* send bitcoins to our gateway address: 1KduukGNb5SH8L6oDwQf8sDrKk68fjvnvF

* send bitBTC to our gateway account: metaexchangebtc

Any bitcoins you send will be turned into bitBTC by the gateway (after 1 confirmation) and sent to your bitshares account. Any bitBTC that you send to the gateway will be turned into bitcoins and sent to your bitcoin wallet.

We have funded the gateway with 0.5 BTC/0.5 bitBTC for testing purposes, there is a 0.01 BTC transaction size limit at the moment. Please use small amounts to test this with - this is beta software and may contain bugs, you could lose funds.

For this test there are no transaction fees.

We are well aware that this private key importing process isn't usable for the non-techy, so the next step is to create a simple website to make this procress 100% frictionless, which is what I'll be working on next.

Cheers, Paul.

*) The reason private keys must be compressed is that the bitshares client always converts any private key (compressed or uncompressed) into a compressed public key and since there are two different bitcoin addresses associated with each private key (one from the compressed key, one from the uncompressed version) funds may not arrive in your bitcoin wallet if you import the incorrect type, since the bitshares account public key is turned into a bitcoin address by the daemon.

In case of error, you can import the other version of the private key into your bitcoin wallet to get the funds, but this requires a rescan, which takes a while.

A common merchant workflow is to generate a new bitcoin address for every site user, so you can map deposited funds to user.

With bitshares the closest thing you can do is to generate a new private key and then call wallet_import_private_key and hand out the bitshares address to the user.

Is this a feasible workflow, will it scale ok?