Dash, on The Web.

• https://rpc.digitalcash.dev (mainnet)
• https://trpc.digitalcash.dev (testnet)

(RPC Web Proxy and RPC Explorer for integrators)

Why

These are the services that I wish I had had access to years ago. It would have saved me 10s of hours to have all the tools and documentation available together directly on the web, immediately - also getting a jumpstart on coding without waiting for hours of syncing.

This proposal serves 2 functions:

1. Literal “buy in” on the idea that:

   • We believe that we want Digital Cash on The Web
     and
   • We want to lower the barrier to entry for Developers - especially Web Devs

2. Applying payment towards the hosting of redundant RPC Web Proxy & Explorer setups for both mainnet and testnet

How

“Hello World”, without hours of sync.

Typically ALL of the Dash RPCs are restricted from public use by a password.

This means that in order to access them, you have to have a full node fully synced. And if you don’t have the correct, non-default options turned on, you have to sync again.

Additionally, the necessary documentation and services necessary to use the RPCs effectively - the RPC help, the DCG docs, Insight APIs, Faucets, etc - are scattered, abstracted in ways that aren’t intuitive, and often out-of-date.

Dash RPC Web Proxy

dash-rpcproxy authorizes and makes a full node’s public RPCs directly available on The Web without the need for any additional tools or layers of abstraction or indirection.

• Written in Go for speed and security
• whitelists Public RPCs
• private RPCs remain unavailable
• CORS-enabled for Web Apps
• serves built-in RPC Explorer, or a custom version
• whitelist can be customized (requires restart)

Although some of this functionality is available through Insight, this:

• exposes ALL RPC capabilities
• doesn’t require code updates to support RPC changes
• doesn’t have artificial bytes limits or memory-related bugs
• easiest possible install
  (just copy the file and run it)
• cross-platform binary with no dependencies
  (Linux, Mac & Windows, on x64 and ARM)

Dash RPC Explorer

The Explorer makes it possible for anyone to explore and test the RPCs right from their web browser, and provides a single point of access to other important resources.

• Autocompletes all RPCs in the Public Whitelist
• Shows help for each RPC when selected
• Shows an example of using the RPC with common developer tools
  • curl
  • fetch
• Links to the CrowdNode and DCG Faucets (testnet only)
• Links to DCG Docs

Always the latest dashd

The service has 2 full nodes on each network.

The default server is updated to the latest dashd from the DCG GitHub Releases, every day.

The other server remains on the previous version for at least several days, and can be switched immediately switch if anything goes wrong during an update.
(and I have a future goal to make guaranteed access to the stable server paid in DASH)

Hosting by MNOs

Although I intend these sets of services to be available for as long as the community finds them useful, my vision is to see these services - and many others like them - hosted directly by, and being directly profitable to, the MNOs that choose to run them.

I have another proposal in mind for how to accomplish that, which I’ll retroactively link here once it’s ready. Essentially the idea is to integrate Dash keys with Web-standard auth tokens to directly pay (or stake collateral) for API usage - a mix of time and number of requests, as is common in the industry.

What

I’ve set up a total of 6 servers for this service. The redundant mainnet and testnet nodes are provisioned according to a mix of the recommendations at https://www.dash.org/blog/dash-evolution-v1-0-0-release-announcement/ and my own experimentation, which I’ve documented at https://webinstall.dev/dashd/.

That totals $182/month on Digital Ocean, which I use as a baseline for simplicity’s sake since they have about the best pricing available:

• 2x Full Nodes on mainnet
  • $48/month for 4 vCPU + 8GB RAM
  • $15/month for 150GB Storage
• 2x Full Nodes on testnet
  • $24/month for 2 vCPU + 4GB RAM
  • (no extra storage)
• 2x Web Proxies
  • $4/month for 1 vCPU + 512MB RAM
  • (no extra storage)
• 1x Domain
  • $17/year

My ask of 4 DASH serves to apply towards my own costs, but more importantly signals that the fair market cost of running these services is worth making Digital Cash accessible on The Web.

Meta

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