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[Meta][Developers Needed] Building the infrastructure to allow for mass darkcoin adoption

N

nj47

Guest
Alright I've been thinking about this for a while now and am ready to share my concluding thoughts with the community.

Darkcoin has a truly novel premise - anonymity - that is just about ready for the main stage. I've spent a lot of time trying to break the testnet - and everytime I was able to, Evan was able to modify the protocol to make my exploits impossible. The last RC4 revision fixed almost every possible attack vector I have been able to come up with, and at this point I am confident there will be a fully functional version ready for public adoption very soon.

However, as a community, we are _not_ ready for this. We are missing large parts of our infrastructure if we want to quickly grow and scale. We have lots of information on what we need, we can take lessons from bitcoin, litecoin, and dogecoin on what creates mass adoption. I believe it is imperative as a community we fix this ASAP. In doing so we will make it possible for darkcoin adoption to rise rapidly without the hiccups that otherwise would occur.

My point for this thread is two-fold. 1.) We need to compile a list of missing infrastructure. I have a starting list of necessary things, but I would love community discussion to brainstorm what I haven't included, and the order of importance of what I have. 2.) Find the developers willing to help contribute to this infrastructure.

Thankfully Darkcoin is built on the same platform of Bitcoin which means a lot of this is as simple as porting previous implementations to darkcoin. However a lot of this simply has not been done - and no matter how trivial, it creates an unnecessary barrier to entry that may prevent adoption by some who otherwise would have if the libraries they needed were available.

Infrastructure Needed
  • Darkcoin libraries for all relevant programming languages.
    • Darkcoin has new features that are missing in many of the bitcoin libraries.
    • Ideally they all should be linked, at a minimum by a wiki article, or possibly all in the same github repository.
  • Darkcoin integration into popular ecommerce platforms
    • Zen Cart
    • OsCommerce
    • Magento
    • Shopify
    • WooCommerce - Wordpress plugin
    • Etc
  • iPhone App - Now that apple is allowing cryptocurrency wallets again, let's make it happen
    • This is a little trickier, until darksend is open source, I'm not sure how easy integration on a thin client will be. This is a challenge I personally will have to tackle with the alternative wallet I am creating - more news on that to come!
  • Windows Phone App - Not sure about this one, but at least something to discuss!
  • Reddit tip bot
  • Darkcoin Payment Processor
    • Such as coinbase or bitpay
    • It should pay merchants out in darkcoin, bitcoin, or USD - at the merchants choice. Fees must be no more than 1.5% or the incentive to use darkcoin is limited as BitPay offers 0% fees for bitcoin -> USD transactions
    • This one is very challenging. There are some legal ramifications that need to be addressed. If it would be considered a currency exchange, FinCEN registration and regulations would need to be followed. If anyone knows details on how Coinbase and Bitpay comply with these, I would love to hear them.
    • The other risk is darkcoin price is volatile. It is a young currency and even over the course of time it takes for a payment to confirm may experience a large price spike. The processor must be cognizant of this and have methods in place to minify this risk.
  • A centralized location for all of ^^^^^^^^^ this. Make it easy for anyone to find exactly what they need.
  • A darkcoin-developers mailing list, forum, or something where we can easily share ideas and discuss development of darkcoin related software. A subforum here may suffice, though I ask it be invite only or heavily moderated to keep the discussion relevant.
Developers
I am a node.js/PHP/Java developer. These days 99% of my work is in node.js though. I have some very interesting things in private development at the moment, however if there were any interested parties I would be more than willing to open source just about everything I am working on.

I would love to see Python and Ruby libraries built. I already ported the node.js RPC library, and have a private abstraction library to handle most of the details that I am working on cleaning up for a public release.

Java and Objective-C / Swift are critical for mobile app development as well.

Keeping things user friendly
This is a topic that I have spent a large portion of the last 6 months working on in general. As developers, we tend to be very blind to the needs and limitations of the general user. It is critical we make sure the tools and platforms we build are usable by everyone. Now obviously cryptocurrency, in general, is a technologically difficult concept. Getting people to think beyond the "isn't bitcoin a scam", or "isn't bitcoin for buying drugs online", or "didn't bitcoin get hacked", etc is beyond what I am talking about here. Leave that to the bitcoiners. What I am talking about is directly UI/UX. The general rule I go by is: If your mom couldn't figure it out, you are not done, you need to make the interface more intuitive.

Conclusion
What am I missing? What order of importance do you see for my current list? Are you an interested developer - what are you capable of working on, are you interested in finding other people to work on a project with?

Thoughts?
 
Hello, I'm a web developer with c# server knowledge. I've started putting together a site for DrkLord which aims to tackle some of the things you mentioned. Mainly a centralised point for all things dark... Within reason.

You forgot an android wallet or even apps.
 
Hello, I'm a web developer with c# server knowledge. I've started putting together a site for DrkLord which aims to tackle some of the things you mentioned. Mainly a centralised point for all things dark... Within reason.

You forgot an android wallet or even apps.
Thanks for your response. As far as things like this is concerned, I will happily trade a little be of centralization for ease of use!

I didn't include android wallet because one already exists!

I was also hoping to get a discussion among the community on what kind of apps they want to see - and then I would take the good ideas people came up with and add them to the post.
 
I agree. Things need to be done. But some things are already in the works.
We got a working Android wallet. For iPhone I think we dont need a wallet that supports darksend yet. Sending&Recieving should be enough for now. Windows Phone? Isn't that dieing already? :D
We got people working on the Darkcoin Electrum wallet. http://electrum-drk.org/

I already created a priceticker app for sailfish OS. The more recent versions include the more important other anon-cryptos too. I'm about to submit it to the Jolla harbour.

I'm a big fan of ruby and already spent some thoughts on porting the infamous bitcoin-ruby gem. https://github.com/lian/bitcoin-ruby
Adding DRK support would be great, but on the other hand I hardly find time to get things done recently.

Anyways, I think most stuff will be done sooner or later. We already got payment processors accepting darkcoin: Expresscoin, CoinPayments, Moolah, AltAccept ... etc

By the way, for everyone who wants get involved with darkcoin more than just reading forums, join the Darkcoin Core Team.
https://darkcointalk.org/account/join-user-groups
 
I've written my own 3rd-party PyQT wallet with a few simple MN monitoring tools built in, and added multithreaded p2p chat yesterday. Took me a week or so in my spare time to figure out how to do it all. Now I'm working on expanding the p2p chat bit into a simple marketplace, having more or less understood the underlying gubbins.

It's not exactly polished right now, to put it mildly, but I'm enjoying playing with it.

I'm thinking MNs could be used as keyservers for the exchange of buyer/seller keys or something, still thinking about what would be most useful.
 
I've written my own 3rd-party PyQT wallet with a few simple MN monitoring tools built in, and added multithreaded p2p chat yesterday. Took me a week or so in my spare time to figure out how to do it all. Now I'm working on expanding the p2p chat bit into a simple marketplace, having more or less understood the underlying gubbins.

It's not exactly polished right now, to put it mildly, but I'm enjoying playing with it.

I'm thinking MNs could be used as keyservers for the exchange of buyer/seller keys or something, still thinking about what would be most useful.
Could you put it on github? Would love to watch it!
 
Could you put it on github? Would love to watch it!
As I say, it's just a proof of concept and extremely unfinished, I'm just throwing paint around the playpen. And with python, using github would just slow down my half baked experiments. But currently it looks like this:

5b8itj.png


Send money etc. functions are all there and work but I've removed the buttons from the UI to prevent expensive accidents while testing. :eek:

Need to learn how to use QT Designer properly as I'm getting bored of manually moving widgets about.
 
We're developing an android wallet watcher which will give notifications to the user when a transaction occurs. Targeted at the MN owners and those won't can't be arsed to load up a block explorer to did out their balance.

It will notify when a payment is recieved. How useful this is remains to be seen.
 
Wasn't sure whether to post this in a new thread, but it fits this one, so:

tl;dr: OpenBazaar would be very happy for any of us to hack away on their project, help beta test etc. and it looks like getting OpenBazaar to work with Darkcoin wouldn't be too much of a pain. So anyone interested in a p2p market using Darkcoin, come and play!

Here's an exchange I had with the OpenBazaar developers...

<[email protected]>
to project

Hi,

I have been looking at this project and wondered if you had considered Darkcoin either instead of or in addition to Bitcoin as a payment option? Bitcoin as you are aware is at best 'pseudononymous,' and is increasingly subject to attempts at regulation.

Darkcoin offers genuinely anonymous transactions, has a real and talented developer (Evan Duffield) and a fantastic community at www.darkcointalk.org.

Darkcoin's anonymous transactions (Darksend, now Darksend+ with the upcoming RC4 release) are facilitated by a distributed network of Masternodes, currently numbering over 800, which could also easily host anything OpenBazaar needed for a scalable and resilient backbone. Each Masternode is privately owned and administrated, and run on (usually) a rented VPS.

The Masternodes are a fantastic resource and I am sure that a great many Masternode ops (probably the vast majority) would be delighted to run whatever you wanted them to – we share the OpenBazaar philosophy of privacy to trade without governmental oversight and coercion.

I ask because I am also working on a python p2p distributed marketplace with a view to putting all those Masternode servers to good use, but I am an amateur free-time coder and you guys are far further along than I am!

If you were to drop by at darkcointalk.org you would get a very warm welcome and there are lots of folk there far more talented than I who might be useful to your project. Please swing by if you get a minute, I think Darkcoin is a perfect fit for OpenBazaar and I hope you will too.

Kind regards,
Stu.

Sam Patterson <[email protected]>
to me

Stu,

Thanks for reaching out. For now, OpenBazaar is going to be Bitcoin only, but as it's an open-source project we welcome folks to either fork and make their own alt-coin specific marketplace or submit pull requests to incorporate another type of currency into OpenBazaar itself.

We're busting ass to try and get beta launched by the end of the month, so we're going to be narrowly focused on Bitcoin for the forseeable future, but please take a look at the code and feel free to reach out to us in a few months when we're better able to consider incorporating alt-coins.

As to your own marketplace, if you want to consider helping us build OpenBazaar then forking when it's built, we're not opposed to that. We need all the help we can get!

Cheers,
Sam Patterson

[email protected]>
to Sam

Hi Sam,

Thanks for the reply! I'll certainly be having a closer look at OpenBazaar and having a good play around with it. Anything I can usefully contribute I'll be very glad to.

Best wishes,
Stu.

[email protected]
to me, project
Hi Stuart,

Thanks for your email, we appreciate the interest!

For the moment all of our efforts are concentrated on using Bitcoin for the moment. However, if you read up on our documentation (docs folder), the Ricardian contracts themselves are currency agnostic. I imagine it won't be long after beta that we will code into the client more flexibility in selecting the type of cryptocurrency to be used. However, our whole risk management model revolves around the ability to do multisignature transactions. I personally don't have much knowledge about Darkcoin in this respect. If not, Bitcoin can always be used as a stepping-stone currency until multisig features become stock-standard for altcoins.

When we do start to dip our toes into this field, we'll be sure to contact you. Until then, we hope you participate in our upcoming beta at the end of the month.

Regards,
drwasho


[email protected]>
to drwasho
Hi drwasho,

Thanks for the response!

Darkcoin was deliberately built on top of the existing Bitcoin protocol to make using established infrastructure easy - any rpc/daemon call etc that Bitcoin uses will also work with Darkcoin and multisig is handled exactly the same way as Bitcoin too.

Getting OpenBazaar to work with Darkcoin is probably slightly more involved than 'find and replace bitcoind with darkcoind' but hopefully not much!

Anyway I'm looking forward to experimenting... :)

Regards,
Stu.


drwasho
to me

Hi Stuart,

We don't have any plans of integrating a bitcoin wallet into OB, so we have left it up to the users to arrange the money transfer outside of the OB client. So integration with OB may be even simpler than it seems.

Thanks again.

Regards,
drwasho



<[email protected]>
to drwasho

Hi drwaho,

Sounds promising! Would you and Sam mind if I posted this exchange at the darkcointalk forum? I think a lot of people there would be very happy to hear that you guys are open to contributions, and you'd surely get some more beta testers...

Regards,
Stu.

drwasho

cleardot.gif

to me

cleardot.gif

Be our guest!
 
Litebit.eu is an awesome payment processor which also processes darkcoin. I can really recommend it.
Today I tested the bitsms.eu service which allows sending anonymous messages paying with darkcoin.
The processing was very professional and well-working, just like the big players like bitpay and coinbase.
I would really recommend looking into that service for every merchant.
 
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