Topic: [ANNOUNCE] Zero Reserve - A distributed Bitcoin Exchange - page 7. (Read 57062 times)

Because the bank is YOU. Or ME. If we're friends, you'll see in the system that the balance between you and me is currently maybe EUR +2000,-. And tomorrow maybe EUR -600,-. Depending on all the action between you and me or our friends and friends' friends.

We may choose to settle the balance between us eventually from time to time with some fiat cash, or not. Either way, we'd all continue to use our regular bank accounts as usual, without our respective banks suspecting anything.

Hi OP,

Maybe I overread the part where you explain how you will manage to implement the whole idea without a gateway to the traditional banking system, as you promise in OP?
I think your idea is great and deserves attention but how exactly are you trying to skirt the need for any bank accounts tied to the system?

I hope there is some way to use peoples bank accounts or paypal or whatever to settle debts automatically. If you would rely on people meeting in person to settle their debts this cannot work on a global scale. If you rely on Bitcoin's world wide adoption for this to work, it could take decades to become a viable alternative to bank transfers or PP.

Just an idea: This Open Transactions guy suggested the decentralized use of peoples bank accounts within his system (where he had the "The HOLY GRAIL!" thread). It made sense by the time I was reading it. You may want to take a look, its in the OP: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-holy-grail-i-wish-i-could-kiss-the-author-of-bitmessage-on-his-face-212490

also find answers and descriptions in the last post: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2384304

Cheers

They knew an account number, but reliably only if you withdraw fiat.

Let's see if this affects their volume. But I guess it doesn't, people don't care
about extra work when doing their taxes (and/or the extra risk) or perhaps use fake ID for such purposes.

yeah it's been known for a while

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lpfg7/bitstamps_new_verification_requirements/

but no wonder at all. Of course they have to follow regulations.

Also not such a big deal if using such exchanges. They know your bank account and see where the fiat's coming from anyway.

Just got this:



when I tried to deposit some coins on an exchange. Probably old hat for many, but it came as a surprise to me. Wonder how long until we are obliged to register all addesses with BB. Gotta hurry up to get this out. It feels like the pain with centralized exchanges might get intense enough so the inconveniences of setting up RetroShare don't register any more.

Newbie question here https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3273678

Added.


Yes. That went very smooth - just had to click on the certificate link to add you. Just like Zero Reserve, that works as long as there exists an unbroken chain of friends connecting us and you have my key.

The difference to ZR is that ZR routes Bitcoin orders or payments only as long as there is an unbroken like of credit. So I granted you 2000 ug of Fools Gold and 2000 Zimbabwe Dollar.

You should now be able to see the Forum and a number of chat lobbies, especially Zero Reserve.

Hi anu,

very cool idea. I added your RS certificate, here's mine:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: OpenPGP:SDK v0.9

mQINBE/DVk0BEADd0cA56Yb5s/LweuZmUUUD4juwCi2WdUAmpqR/+Inh4mPu61l9
PLm+K47dCTgbvFM0e49F9tvrX7lL9YmdVOYHZZ5qT5AowPaurpKHnAaFT6dWCgD/
RYkqnIlGCWcQrmYeYtZiWqjPwguuSEiTRPnQwrgxsxUOJsNfUa5h420zBMW3YVJ8
yKVF+UvuNyK1Lm5vYjB5pj/Ir1yNxnYgnHh9KksA7Xs1vbSfm2CGarJeI9+Gi1KX
uHHA9lJ/C6koaU/jlYm9k7GItkxI9U/6G++Y0kVV5tA2/eTGfRQ4WC58H/jQvYU8
aSYhHx0Ib9AppBFxnhBpY+o4chcBTyjQDNQcGYNtkKAI3d1NKPhhjfzj425kwEpL
k1eNkKAi36R2uRNyxhaDRAF8bSZ+xpCsvt5DgOjOmJ6mY5E33piW1QgQLvhNQeve
d+Xzzr9b0/ODObL2wqJ4MXlafCAlUUV7GkDtWE5PVmLDfrfoMIJpRowwW5cL0IV9
QbeV+9ZdUa/y1scXglWVT+K61j4yWESt6z85vi4KsW/r4El2Ncrdde2cohfqElwD
wbCJ0E43ENqgzwhLw2px2BjqTFB0kfe3xBbXgNW3sz2HCYj3NnzyyWN9QKtLEVyw
WxUa4zTmZU9diV8uFaFIwttAlQ/Bi9r1fscdMXACHZ3zGVgwpB/mPmjdGQARAQAB
tBtLeW9vIEt5b28gPGt5b29AcmlzZXVwLm5ldD6JAj8EEwECACkFAk/DVk0CGy8F
CQeGH4AHCwkIBwMCAQYVCAIJCgsEFgIDAQIeAQIXgAAKCRCBYX1XGOPC6n9tD/93
pbYlmeQyZce6TT0GScKK5nOgwnd9UI5H3OYTvgZklbt6KRUPlCKvAGieNgTipllb
JS2VE087WNKLLSgdf29J0s8WCytGG/geOaLlW8lNBVJrlUi6evKt3zm1suL6UQg5
v9NA0EPz3r47rGAQdSsjM+E7wUlKjDBpKlbwDU68+HmaV1/he8NVC1hbmTyZAYMV
8Qq/nOWVFZzsnZswffYjoZLn+UOfalVtbmXnGFcgaVYgnkHDDMedHmqJqWIUDX+p
YNLmVZ2x88QFVwkLUImohzOlfOo89VNMUFTqwAtcpCHH1K7X5W5fGc6F1fSOyqfb
SsifNzyw+xmmPXXBlnvcAeC+/a1uxoNWvagjAYhaEpw4PfEceW+6Bfa71M52kVfU
VyOhoSbfyAA1dbBGZ29T7w2bNQL8rw9dMe6IMi+0gHIXe0fWHvWZ5lHjMPG8sula
QS9ycLRAikgizWWW2vWSbQ7i+ejcUOKG79uOo7Agab4XSOPfVWymIPRIX3/1ljh4
RyaPKS03wNcuGQcpxgOkMOXztkGrCN2eyOwoeECH2zy+ZOK0Ks3pi4T972t2ExYf
jP970pUxyE9iQp4xGbSG2eNuzEvRw6WCAMJQpvwhg5xf3v7OP2t31MebMMT3SkVD
9YThBmLSzsVrRJJqVnLCcTpyAEI4qKJETnRdSs3ulw==
=BkWJ
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
--SSLID--e100bc19687ee06fb6749b8787251d6f;--LOCATION--Laptop;
--LOCAL--192.168.1.5:15593;--EXT--46.19.137.116:15593;


I also sent you a distant message, for testing purposes, did you get it?


Cheers

Thanks cave. I realise that trying to use it with no friends was a mistake Still, sites like Facebook have ways to help you resolve that problem (by helping you find friends, etc). Bootstrapping off existing social networks is not a sin, I feel.

Hi all,

I want to answer some of the complains/issues here. Some of them are valid. some not. hope the detailed answers do not offend anybody.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This is related to the cache transfer things. All subsribed Forums of the friendly bot are transferred to you. Every Forum you subscribed is writeable. Every subscribed forum is shared to your friends.
cache system which shares the forums/channels is implemented very bad. all is resent always... new GXS implementation will do that in a more GIT Style. Resend only Deltas.
Synching the cache needs his time the first time.
The Forums are reimplemented with the GXS too. atm they are shown as missing if the data is not synched yet.

True. Though starting together with a single friend or together with group of friends is a lot more easy. Than starting without any advice or friends to connect.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Related to the bad Gui.
I am in contact with the Team of http://www.mailpile.is/
They maybe want to add RetroShare as a Mail Backend to solve the Problem of the METADATA with PGP encrypted Mails.
Distant Messaging of RetroShare is more scaleable and is totally decentralized. And solves the MetaData Issues of e-Mail because they are forwarded through the RetroShare network like packets of FileSharing.
Pls consider: the ChatServer itself blocks all FileSharing. You need "real" friends with AnonRouting/Turtle enabled to participate.

If you are interrested in Mailpile Frontend for RetroShare, please drop them a line and ask them friendly if they want to put it on their ToDo or Technololgy of Interrest lists.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

@Mike
Pls get in contact with https://github.com/G10h4ck/RetroShare-Android-Client G10h4ck, he is implementing RetroShare for Android.
Atm he is doing it for RetroShare noGui via the SSH-RPC interface.
He is planning a RetroShare miniCore for Android too (future).
Have a look at the Repos of https://github.com/RetroShare/ There is the https://github.com/RetroShare/pyrs Python Retroshare Interface Library



+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

All in all these questions are known "Newbie" Problems. i faced 99% of them too and had similar feelings about RetroShare. Especially the undead WebForum which made me feel the whole project is abandoned and undead  dropped years ago. no active userbase. But this isn't true. The RetroShare users do most communication inside. Offline from any webcrawlers or spying or advertising or any organizations.
There are several RetroShare Island-Nets in the world. Without any connection between. Without any knowledge of existence.
I have heard of Closed-Private-RetroShare networks for a defined group of users.

If anyone has detailed or generic questions, please feel free to ask.

Read http://redd.it/18vsq5 before it solves most questions.

If someone is interrested to run its own ChatSever to bootstrap RetroShare in his favored community, like a BTCchat or any other topic to bootstrap the UserBase. pls let me know. I would kindly help you to setup the ugly frontend and the retroshare-chatserver backend.

or ask directly in one of the ChatServer rooms:
https://retrochat.piratenpartei.at/ & HowTo https://retrochat.piratenpartei.at/w2c/howto.html
The other chatserver shares the same rooms: http://retrosharechatserver.no-ip.org/w2c/en/ and is community driven.

You are free to run RetroShare without any connection to other RetroShare-Nets and use it only as DarkNet for your closed circle of friends as a secure communication tool.

br cave

same

looks cool

Haha. I'm wearing pants! The funny thing is, I hardly ever use Java at Google. Almost all my work there was C++ (and a mishmash of Google specific languages like Sawzall).

Actually when I started on bitcoinj I thought, ugh, Java. I didn't want to use it but that was the price of entry for Android. The very early bitcoinj code looks more like C++ than Java.

Over time I came to appreciate it a lot more. The Bitcoin community is really spread out over all the major platforms, so easy portability is a big win. Elimination of lots of kinds of security bugs is another big deal, especially when dealing with money. And these days it's possible to make really slick GUI apps as well, it's not just for server side stuff anymore.

But - it still has a bad reputation. One of my side projects now is to show people it's not so bad really. The biggest pain for now is the big size of the JRE for bundled apps, and integrating with C++. I've done a lot of experiments towards making that easier, like using source-to-source transpilers. Python, Ruby, LISP etc all have JVM based implementations that make interop a breeze.

Anyway, this is offtopic. You use the language/platform most appropriate for the current job. For ZeroReserve if RetroShare provides so much important functionality then it makes sense to integrate with that.

Mike and his Java. It's almost as if he works for a company chained to to the dark language by a product that shall not be named.

OK, great to hear that.

Yeah, having the entire graph locally means you learn the debt-line relationships between nodes, which isn't great, though I haven't thought about whether node identity can be obfuscated somewhat.

Tomorrow I will try and compile the plugin. BTW for some reason I still only see about half the messages in the forum.

Not taking it wrong at all - I really appreciate it. I share many of your concerns, particular the Lotus-Notes-ish feel and the unnecessary difficulties to get up and running. Also the difficulties on getting Zero Reserve on mobile devices. And I am sure the RS developers share them, too. But there are also some strengths in RS which you seem to perceive as weakness...


That was my original plan. I was already in the process of stripping down RS when the developers of RS convinced me to do it as a plugin, promising they'd cater for my needs. My needs are indeed addressing many of the issues you raised.

But I think you misunderstand the friendship issue. Both Ripple and RS is about F2F, not P2P. You can't just go with any peers, like the Bitcoin network can. That means you need to set up your friends - there is no way around that. Your particular problem was that you entered the RS network without existing friends. It would have indeed been easier if you had messaged me your key and used the key I posted above.

Bootstrapping the friend network is IMHO the most cruicial issue. I hope that maybe some trusted members of the Bitcoin community start a kernel of users. Take Casascius, for example. He may not trust me, but I am already trusting him not to run away with my Casascius coins - I could easily trust him a little bit more. One sided trust is sufficient. But it has to start with a kernel - which may become a set of super nodes. From that kernel it will be easier to grow the network outwards.


That seems to raise both privacy and scalability issues. The beauty of the pure F2F approach is that it is strictly local and no information beyond friend-of-friend is known. Also, if you want to use the graph to do the routing a-priori, you need updates who comes online and who goes offline on each node from the entire network. Imagine that on a network with a million nodes or more. Sure - datacenter manageable. But I'd like to keep ZR manageable on a cell phone.

The routing as I implement it takes into account whether or not there is available funds on a route. You certainly do not want *that* information to travel beyond the 2 parties concerned.


The current C++ is just over 5KLOC. I doubt that it will get much bigger than 10KLOC. It should not be so difficult to port Zero Reserve to Java. It has been done with Bitcoin. Which may be a good thing anyway - the first implementation is bound to end up warty.

I did it that way because I am sure this will give results quickest. After what happened lately, I feel it may be a good thing to send a strong message to certain parties: "If you trouble the exchanges too much, you will lose control entirely because then everyone will/must go P2P."

RetroShare is still in early stages and is first and foremost a friend-to-friend communication and file-sharing platform (which in this context works much better and faster than Tor or Freenet because you explicitly allow trusted friends to know your IP), so such kind of teething problems are to be expected, especially when your first use is slightly a bit out of its original context.

ZeroReserve afaik is the first plugin created by other than the original RetroShare developers, so it's all very experimental still.

Oh, I'm not after credit, I'm just interested to see if the work I put into documenting and doing talks had some impact in the end Implementations are the expensive part, ideas are cheap (around here at least).


There are various ways to do it. I did some experiments with auto binding the bcj API into C++, although you still need to ship a JRE with your app. You can delete some files to reduce the size but it's still gonna be on the order of 10-20mb extra. On the other hand, RetroShare alone is 70mb on MacOS.

https://github.com/mikehearn/cppjvm/tree/master/mytest

I made a quick attempt to play with ZR this afternoon, but unfortunately it dampened my enthusiasm somewhat. It was extremely difficult to make RetroShare work. Indeed, I found RS to be hopelessly confusing and the GUI to be quite flaky and badly designed (ignoring that it looks like a Linux app even on MacOS). Firstly it wouldn't import my PGP key for some reason, so I let it create a new one for me. Then I tried to open the forum link but it didn't seem to have registered with my browser. Then I tried to find a way to add that forum within the UI, but there wasn't one. Eventually I figured out I needed to add a friend, but I don't have any RetroShare friends, so I went through another very ugly website to add the Austrian pirate party. It didn't work. Seemed like network issues, but eventually it managed to get a connection to the DHT - it was just very slow. But even then I couldn't add the forum.

So I talked to some guys in one of the chat channels, who told me I need to add a friend who has the forum to be able to subscribe to it. I guessed that means I'd need to add you anu - but I don't know how because I don't have your certificate. Eventually someone told me I should make friends with a bot called Cupcake, so I pastebinned my cert to that person and they made the bot add me as a friend. Then finally I could find and subscribe to the ZeroReserve forums. However they appeared to be empty. My new friend in the chatroom (thanks Tatjana if you read this) told me to reconfigure the bandwidth throttles from the default, so I did, and eventually things appeared. But it took a long time and only some of the messages appeared. Many were marked as "missing", and the font sizes around the app are sometimes randomly too small to read.

Now I'm not exactly a newbie when it comes to computers, but given the ridiculous process required to use even the built in features of RetroShare, my enthusiasm for trying ZeroReserve was somewhat reduced. Although DHT/turtle routing may be the right technical design, it's hard to imagine a distributed exchange taking off when based on a platform that's so very ugly and hard to use.

Is it possible to use some of the RetroShare code perhaps without the complicated friending/setup process and all the rest of the UI paraphernalia?

If I was doing this myself, I'd probably implement a raw broadcast network and have the entire social/debt graph on every node. Once the graph is obtained doing an A* search over it locally is quite reasonable and should be fast enough. I'd do it in Java for the cross-platform support and lack of buffer overflows, as JavaFX in the latest JDK8 is a very modern toolkit that works well on at least MacOS and Linux (supports Retina-resolution GUIs, animations, embedded webkits etc). And the UI would be specific to the app in question rather than a plugin to some larger framework.

I hope you don't take this feedback the wrong way - I really want to see ZeroReserve take off. I'm just not sure it's going to whilst tied to RetroShare.

There is no need for F2F if all you want from ZR is a distributed order book. I'd suggest to do a standalone app for that, distributing the orders using the standard, anonymous P2P approach and glue it to the block chains you have in mind. This is much simpler than ZR - so simple in fact that I wonder why nobody has done it yet.

Part of the motivation for ZR is to provide an alternative to banks to get fiat in and out of the Bitcoin system (or another coin if someone cares to do that). That problem simply does not exist when dealing only with coins.

It would be possible to hook several coins into it but cross transactions would have to rely on trust in your friends (=people you trust with money).