What is Social Wallet?

At the beginning of the year #mmt was doing scoping of the landscape. #socialwalletapi was one tool being built from within the dyne.org crew which we looked into. Here are the notes.

https://hackmd.io/s/Sklf8cCSz#

Social-Wallet (Freecoin) Experimentation Notes

Food for thought for redefining the MVP

Why Freecoin?

Freecoin development is informed by the experience of Dyne.org with blockchain technologies, a vast research into user experience using them and the social research conducted in the D-CENT project.

The motivations behind Freecoin's design choices are detailed in this Digital Social Currency Design document. The main use case for Freecoin are complementary currency systems and credit circuits (C3), but it can well be used as a self-hosted wallet to manage multiple blockchain based accounts.

Freecoin is free and open source software (Affero GNU General Public License v3+) written in Clojure with attention to have everything covered by tests while improving the developer experience.

Freecoin runs on some real-world applications in experimentations piloted by Dyne.org developers in cooperation with other organisations involved in the Commonfare project.

You can learn about the first generation of this software here: http://freecoin.dyne.org/

Why Freecoin in Relation to MMT?

Much of the blockchain space is not ethically or politically in line with some of the core fundamentals of the MMT folks. Freecoin has been built from a social base which is ethically, socially and politically resonant with us. Given we are dealing with blockchain and money as a trojan horse to dealing with power and social relations it makes sense to align our selves with teams who share these ethics as well as using foundational tools which have these ethics encoded within them.

Freecoin toolsets & codebases

You can learn about the first generation of this software here: http://freecoin.dyne.org/

There are three main codebases for this... the API and a wallet which is specific to the macao social centre and the social wallet admin console. API is likely to be the most relevant for us, but we can certainly learn from the macao social wallet

• https://github.com/Commonfare-net/macao-social-wallet
• https://github.com/Commonfare-net/social-wallet-admin-console
• https://github.com/Commonfare-net/social-wallet-api

Social Wallet

https://github.com/Commonfare-net/macao-social-wallet

• Running through the intial README.md instructions
• [name=nikolai] If you want an email-conf.edn you can use (replace USER with mmt)

  {:email-server "smtp.mail.co.uk" :email-user "USER@mail.uk" :email-pass "lV*ooV&KZH6U*" :email-address "USER@mail.uk"}
  

• you will then land on this page: http://localhost:8000/ "Welcome to the Common Coin"
• you can then see routes here: https://github.com/Commonfare-net/macao-social-wallet/blob/master/src/freecoin/routes.clj
• http://localhost:8000/sign-in
• I get stuck when registering an account
• "Sign in email: The account for dh@blockades.org is not yet active."
• Now looking at how to jump into the DB to change this directly
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28819752/collection-is-not-defined
• so I openend the mongo shell with mongo
• show databases
• use freecoin
• show collections
• db["account-store"].find()
• This then gives me my user account info including the activation link.
• From this point it is possible to have user accounts in the system but account balance is 0.
• Need to investigate the admin console next
• UPDATE: you can add funds into the system through an admin account: https://github.com/Commonfare-net/macao-social-wallet/issues/85
• Peg is getting an error page when signing in (after having successfully activated the account): com.mongodb.MongoCommandException - Command failed with error 9: 'The 'cursor' option is required, except for aggregate with the explain argument' on server localhost:27017. The full response is { "ok" : 0.0, "errmsg" : "The 'cursor' option is required, except for aggregate with the explain argument", "code" : 9, "codeName" : "FailedToParse" } anyone else have this problem?

Social Wallet Questions vs. MMT

• how is the transaction log different to MMT [name=dan]
• what functionality is exposed which might be useful for MMT? [name=dan]
• what functionality is present within MMT which might be useful for SW? [name=dan]
• what's the equivalent of the event log of mmt in social-wallet (is this only achieved through clojure being functional? [name=dan] (no, it is stored in mongo [name=nikolai]))
• from what I can initally see (mainly UI), what we have built with MMT is not THAT much different than this (without looking under the hood and digging through the code ) [name=dan]
• think we need to look at the API to unearth multi-sig capability [name=dan]... (there is no multi-sig capability yet [name=nikolai])

Social Wallet Admin Console

https://github.com/Commonfare-net/social-wallet-admin-console

• Run the following: https://github.com/Commonfare-net/social-wallet-admin-console/blob/master/Makefile
• The run lein run server
• Not sure where to go from here now
• I am trying to find out how to assign value to users in the Social Wallet so that I can make some transactions
• https://github.com/Commonfare-net/macao-social-wallet/issues/85
• see line 55

;; side note - it's very interesting using a piece of software which is dealing with such a similar domain to see how another team has tackled various similar 'problems' ;;

Ongoing thoughts

• suggest that we look at freecoin with either faircoin2 or bitcoin as the base blockchain as these are the two which faircoin team have first built up around. Faircoin sits ONTOP of the blockchain, so is blockchain agnostic. I think the thing that we need to figure out is how freecoin might relate to the following areas:

  1. How might this fit in with the transaction log that we have built [name=dan]
  2. How might we use freecoin to handle things such as multisig [name=dan]
  3. What functionality does freecoin afford which might be useful for us (sharded backups (secrets), printed private keys and other things (meatspace tickets etc), identity) [name=dan]
  4. What are we trying to do that is different from what Freecoin is trying to do? Should we just combine efforts? [name=nikolai] <-- I think this is certainly something which we should explore [name=dan]
  5. this is some tech built by good people. Are we just exploring what it can do , or are we driving at something in particular [name=mix]
  6. While it is 'blockchain agnostic' i would be very suprised if it works with non-bitcoin-fork blockchains without modification and this has implications for us if we would wanna use it for ETH/NEO. [name=peg]
  7. The nice thing about our rails app was that NOT interacting with the blockchain made it future-proof. Anything which automates transactions is going to require a lot more maintainence. We can expect to see a lot of changes over the next year and this is something we need to have in mind when investing our time into development. Already we have to accomodate both base58 and bech32 bitcoin addresses, and we will probably need at some point to think about lightning network, and possibly cross-blockchain transactions. ETH similarly has a lot development going on and I would imagine so does NEO. [name=peg]

• once we have spent some time getting our heads around freecoin I can help to get a meeting set up with the lead dev (aspra) or the lead architect (jaromil)

• requires that we get some familiarity with the bitcoin or faircoin blockchain

cc: @Alanna FYI this is some of the notes on hand... not super important to deep dive BUT aspasia is the tech lead of that project.

It's a super interesting project, in a similar neighbourhood, but with very different assumptions and tech approach...

We will be able to get something of a peer review of the ideas we are working with from aspasia as they are so familiar with the field... which is one of the major +1's for @peg
and @Kieran meeting with her at the convergence!