Download:
This version comes with 2 important new features:
Trade statistics and extended Tor support for Bitcoin network and Http requests
I want to give a bit of background for both topics.
To collect trade statistic data in a P2P application is not that trivial as it would be in a server based application, but we found a practical solution which does not introduce privacy or centralization issues.
The trade statistics data are published via the P2P network and each node received those data and displays it in the UI.
Because the new data type is only supported by nodes which have already updated to 0.4.9.1 it might take a bit until the distribution of all the data is stable.
Each node in the P2P network forwards data to his connected nodes, but those old version nodes will not receive that new statistics data so the flooding of messages might take longer as usual.
Also old nodes will not send their past trade data to the network.
For all those reasons you might see the first days incomplete data and past trade volume will not be available until those nodes have updated to the latest version and are online again.
There is no guarantee that old trades will ever be visible if the users don’t use Bitsquare anymore or have deleted their data directory.
The trade data only includes data which is already publicly visible like the offer data or the data which could be derived from the bitcoin blockchain (with much more effort), like trade amount, date and trade price.
We opened also a bounty for getting the statistics available at a web page:
At that Github issue you can find more details and an example of a trade statistics data object.
Another important update in that version is extended Tor support for the Bitcoin network and Http requests.
By default we still use clear net for Tor because it is not tested sufficiently yet and is considered experimental at that state.
But you can enable it under Settings/network.
There you find also the “Use Socks5 proxy for Http requests” check box. That will be enabled for new users but if you had Bitsquae already installed it is deactivated.
If you enable that it will use Tor for http requests to BitcoinAverage (Fiat market price feed).
Unfortunately Poloniex used CloudFlare which is very Tor-unfriendly and requires a captcha for connections from Tor exit nodes. That is why we need to use still clearnet for http requests to Poloniex (Altcoin market price feed). Though that should be a minor privacy concern as there are no personally identifying data in that request.
For those who want to go even further, there are 2 new program arguments for setting up socks5 proxies for bitcoin network and/or http requests.
–socks5ProxyBtcAddress=[host:port] and --socks5ProxyHttpAddress=[host:port]
If socks5ProxyHttpAddress is set but socks5ProxyHttpAddress is not defined the socks5ProxyBtc is used for http requests (instad of the Bitsquare internal Tor instance). But as the proxy will likely be a Tor proxy, we would have the same issues with Poloniex so thats why clearnet is used for Poloniex in that configuration.
If socks5ProxyHttpAddress is defined it should be a non-Tor proxy (e.g. VPN, maybe I2P works,…) and all http traffic including Poloniex will use that proxy.
Another short comment to that release:
Ethereum Classic has requested to change their ticker symbol from ETHC to ETC.
We added implemented but unfortunately we still need to support the old ticker symbol as there are existing offers out with the ETHC symbol.
It will be removed in the next version once there are no more ETHC offers out there.
If you had setup an account with ETHC please remove that and create a new one with ETC.
