The second release (AKA Bee Summer) of Bee improves the utility of the DISC (as released in v0.1.0) and lays the foundation for Swarm bandwidth incentives. To that end, we:
- Add the necessary utilities for developers to start building unstoppable applications on top of Swarm
- Add features which makes it possible for chunks to persist and be globally discoverable in the network
- Add features that improve the UX of already-released features
- Lay the foundation for Swarms bandwidth incentives, ultimately ensuring a self-sustaining network with economically incentivized replication of popular content
This release of Bee comes with a new documentation.
More in detail, the added features are (grouped per category):
-
Create unstoppable applications with:
a. Manifests: a way to represent a collection in Swarm. Use this feature to upload directories or websites to Swarm.
b. Single owner chunks: A special type of chunk where the address is identified as the hash of the owner and a configurable identifier. You can play with the identifier to create all kinds of funky chunks (e.g. feeds) in your virtual personal Swarm address space.
c. Seek in content: Added the necessary nuts and bolts so you can seek in content that is hosted in Swarm. This allows you, among others, to play video content in your browser.
d. name resolution: Content addresses are hard to read and even harder to memorize. That is why you can add name resolution. ENS and RNS name resolution is supported out-of-the-box.
e. encryption: encrypt content by the Bee node before uploading. -
Persistence of content with help of:
a. Local pinning: ensures that certain chunks are not garbage collected on your node.
b. Global pinning: makes locally pinned chunks globally discoverable. -
Improved UX of existing features:
b. Tags: follow the status of your upload with tags.
c. Printconfig: a new command to the bee node, allows you to print the current configuration (including all default values to the console)
d. Install script. This handy install script detects what system you run and makes installing bee a breeze -
Swarm bandwidth incentives through:
a. Accounting in retrieval and push sync: Bee nodes will count the services (download and upload) received and utilized per peer connection
b. Mock settlement protocol: when the accounting signals that there is a big difference in services consumed versus provided per peer connection, the mock settlement protocol allows for sending and receiving mock payments to set the balance back to zero.
All new features and UX improvements are thoroughly documented in the new documentation.
As always you can reach out to us with bug reports and support requests through GitHub and Mattermost.