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
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?
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.
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?
