Support use of private Gaia hubs

[jcnelson]

When testing this site with Gaia association tokens (i.e. testing with a private Gaia hub), the app does not pass the association token to Gaia. This causes all storage requests to fail.

[moxiegirl]

@jcnelson It wasn't created to work with private hubs...and I believe was created prior to when we have association tokens.

The larger question, should every sample app or every app anyone creates from here on out implement somehow association tokens? That, for example, may impact application mining. Are we testing every app to make sure they work with a private Gaia hub?

[jcnelson]

It shouldn't require any development effort to make it work with private hubs -- blockstack.js and the authenticator do the all the heavy lifting there. Using a (already-configured) private hub would "just work." For example, I can do this with xordrive.io.

I think the fix for this would be to use a later version of blockstack.js (I think 19.0.0-alpha4 has the requisite functionality).

Are we testing every app to make sure they work with a private Gaia hub?

Not at the moment AFAIK, but the fix is a matter of getting apps to use the latest version of blockstack.js. I think it's relevant to this app specifically because if developers are getting started with Blockstack via this app and want to start out with a private Gaia hub, they'll be unable to do so.

[moxiegirl]

@jcnelson Definitely, these are things to think about.

At this moment, this sample is about teaching users to get into app development and app mining specifically. Gaia is not currently even a requirement of application mining. So, introducing information about private hub is not part of the requirements for the app. Further, we are not currently pushing use of private hubs.

Right now, introducing association tokens and other details around Gaia would be out of scope. It would be a neat side project tho.