Regenerating storage authentication token when it becomes stale

Currently – gaia hub authentication tokens use a ‘date’ timestamp during authentication. Our default provider will mod arithmetic this timestamp to simulate a validity time. Of course, this means that storage connections in blockstack browser can become stale.

The application will see this as a ‘401’ unauthenticated write when they try to PUT a file to the hub – users will experience a silent error when updating their profile.

This can be remedied for a user by loading:

http://localhost:8888/account/storage#gaiahub

However, blockstack browser should be able to either:

1. Detect that a token became stale and generate a new authentication token
2. Generate the token at the time of write, on each write

(2) will be a 1 round-trip slower, but has the benefit of reducing state

[markmhx]

This should be fixed by upgrading the version of blockstack.js used by the browser to the latest.

[kantai]

@benoror reported experiencing this issue (and I think a number of other users have run into it as well).

The smart-profile-writes update actually sort of mitigates this issue, by generating a token when the profile updates (however, writing to old profile locations (i.e., /root-address/x/profile.json) still tries to use the global token).