TLDR; NanoMate is back online, and free. Please try it out to help us load-test the new PoW service.
If you haven't seen my posts before, NanoMate is "the best way to introduce your friends to Nano". It allows you to send Nano to someone who doesn't have a wallet or address, by sending via an escrow account and notifying your friend. It's designed to help Nano adoption by making it easy and effective to introduce your friends to Nano by sending them a small amount.
When you create an escrow address, you'll be given a 'secret redeem link', that you can send to the recipient however you like. Any Nano you send to the generated address can be unlocked by anyone with the secret redeem link.
The "Redeem" page on NanoMate assumes no familiarity with Nano - or even CryptoCurrency in general - and walks your friend through the process of getting a wallet and redeeming their newfound Nano.
NanoMate has been offline for the last week because we were getting some timeout errors when waiting for PoW from our own node. The node can take 30+ seconds to generate a work solution (and it's not just a $5 DO droplet). We have a 30s limit because requests go through Amazon API gateway which has a 30s hard cap.
Thanks to the new PoW service by u/jayycox, we can now offload PoW calculations to a distributed network of nodes that will get reimbursed for their service. You can read more about the service in James' post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/94lx28/distributed_nano_pow_subscription_system/
Proof of Work now takes 3-10s, which solves all our issues. Not only that, but we now pre-compute the proof of work for redemptions, so they take less than a second to process.
I've also decided to make the service free. Previously there was a fee of 1c, and I was planning to eventually raise it to try and get the service to pay for itself. Rather than take this approach (which doesn't really add up if you do the calculations anyway) I decided to make it free to use, and I'll look for other ways to get the service to pay for itself.
We're looking to see how this new PoW system scales, so if you have the time, please try the service out either by sending Nano to yourself, or to a friend who you think might appreciate it. You can send as little as 0.0001 Nano (or less, but all the notifications will round it down to 0 Nano, which looks weird). I welcome all feedback!