On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Eric Voskuil <eric@???> wrote:
> No, I'm leaving that question to Amir. However, in previous discussions there was talk about adoption of the Obelisk protocol changes, which presupposes adoption of the blockchain work.

Well, this question is really the crux of the matter.

The goal is to produce an easy-to-install Darkwallet server, so
there's no point in packaging the version2 stuff if its server part
isn't ready yet. It would make more sense to package version1 for now.

Even if the version2 server were ready today, there are still the
slight protocol changes to deal with. This is really unfortunate,
since we already have three projects that depend on the old protocol
(AirBitz, OpenBaazar, and DarkWallet). This is not the time to be
breaking compatibility! We at AirBitz certainly won't be able to
deploy the version2 server, regardless of how nice it is, unless it
has binary compatibility with the old one. We already have too many
customers using our stuff in the wild.

I wonder if there is some way to retain binary-compatibility between
the version1 obelisk and version2 libbitcoin-server. For instance, I
believe the "subscribe" message has changed to allow prefix
subscriptions. We could fix this by bringing back the old,
more-limited "subscribe" message, and putting the new, enhanced
functionality in a "subscribe2" message. This might be worth looking
into if the version2 libbitcoin-server is getting close to release.

-William