Release 0.14.1 brings many incremental improvements over 0.14. It does not break consensus; 0.14 nodes are compatible with 0.14.1 nodes.
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Fast Synchronization. In its default setting, Blockstack needs to index the underlying blockchain in order to construct its name database and Atlas state. This can take days. To improve the user experience, 0.14.1 adds a
fast_sync
command that allows the user to fetch, verify, and bootstrap off of an existing node's recent state. Synchronizing withfast_sync
takes only a few minutes. -
RESTful API. Blockstack now comes with a RESTful API, available by default at
http://localhost:6264
. The API enables external applications to register and manage names, send and receive wallet funds, fetch and store off-chain data, and query the Blockstack network state. Users control which applications have access to which endpoints, so they have the final say over which capabilities each application may access. Documentation is available here. -
Zone file wizard. The CLI interface in 0.14.1 comes with an interactive zone file wizard that makes it easy to add, remove, and change the priority of URLs to off-chain data. Before, users were expected to craft new zone files by hand, which proved tedious and error-prone.
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Data Stores (experimental). This release comes with an experimental API for creating data stores. A data store is a per-application and per-name filesystem whose data is replicated across a set of storage providers (specified in the name's zone file). The intended use-case is to give an application a way to persistently store a user's data in the place(s) the user chooses. This way, users always have access to their data and can take it with them from application to application, and developers are no longer responsible for hosting it.
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Merged Repositories. Blockstack's CLI, indexer, integration tests, and registrar are all now present in this repository.
If you are upgrading from a previous installation of Blockstack:
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In
~/.blockstack/client.ini
you should changerpc_token=...
toapi_password=...
. -
You should upgrade your wallet to the latest supported format. This can be done with
blockstack setup_wallet
. Be sure to back up your wallet first, for safety (the wallet file is at~/.blockstack/wallet.json
). -
You must start the API server before carrying out name operations. This can be done with
blockstack api start
.
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You can specify the wallet password on the CLI with
--password PASS
. -
You can enable debug output on the CLI with
--debug
. -
You can have the CLI assume the default response with
--yes
. -
You can try out name registration commands with
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Name registration commands are much more responsive now, due to parallelization of the internal safety checks and queries the CLI tool needs to make.
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Various ad-hoc safety-checks and error-reporting are now consolidated, and the error-reporting logic has been made consistent.