"Facilitation of trade and barter"

[trosel]

I saw this line on the Feature Roadmap of Nomad Network: "Facilitation of trade and barter" - https://unsigned.io/nomadnet/

Just wanted to say that one of the things that got me thinking about Reticulum was to use it as a network specifically for sending Grin slatepack messages around.

Grin is sort of unique in that you either need both parties to be online at the same time, or you need to send these slatepacks back and forth a couple of times.

A slatepack message looks like this in text form

BEGINSLATEPACK. 4H1qx1wHe668tFW yC2gfL8PPd8kSgv
pcXQhyRkHbyKHZg GN75o7uWoT3dkib R2tj1fFGN2FoRLY
GWmtgsneoXf7N4D uVWuyZSamPhfF1u AHRaYWvhF7jQvKx
wNJAc7qmVm9JVcm NJLEw4k5BU7jY6S eb. ENDSLATEPACK.

Pretty cool way to transact, I think. Of course, different currencies and systems will have different solutions for doing this sort of thing, though.

Anyway, just sharing some thoughts I had for how I might utilize Reticulum in the future. Basically combining Reticulum with a crypto wallet in the same app.

Anyone else have ideas about "facilitation of trade and barter"?

[4c3e]

Wow very interesting! So users can manually send those text messages back and forth via LoRa/ packet radio etc, without the explicit use of a blockchain?
I'm not too active in the digital currency space, but I do know that something like Chaumian ecash could also potentially work over reticulum.

[trosel]

without the explicit use of a blockchain?

The transaction still finalizes on the blockchain of course!

something like Chaumian ecash could also potentially work over reticulum.

Oh yes, this project is chaumian mints for bitcoin: https://github.com/fedimint/minimint

[trosel]

Now I'm realizing that @markqvist probably just meant the ability to post "for sale" ads and things on Reticulum. Not necessarily the transaction part haha

[trosel]

Or you could simply add Reticulum as a transport option to the Grin wallet

This is what I was thinking of. Basically you could create a wallet that behaves more like Venmo or Cashapp if you had a messaging layer. To me, that is the end goal! With simple swipe gestures to manage the phases of signing slatepacks.

Having the ability to bootstrap economic activity and fungibility within an arbitrary domain, from zero and with (virtually) zero cost is a really great tool

Yes, I totally see that! Tokens on the Lightning network come to mind. The value of the tokens only come from who is issuing them, which seems accurate to how value really works. Of course the value from a global blockchain is that the "who" is "the whole world" / "everyone committing hash power" :)

[yeastplume]

Don't take my word on this as gospel, since I haven't read their full implementation. This is just what I believe from my initial understanding. But from what I understand, you could build the entire slatepack message just from the EC point math already in Reticulum, and then send it to some node on the Grin network for finalization. You would of course need to hook into a Grin wallet somehow to get the signing keys for actually building the slatepack message, and I don't know exactly how, or even if, there is an API for that, but I can't imagine that it's not possible.

There is indeed an extensive grin-wallet API docs for which can be found at https://docs.rs/grin_wallet_api/latest/grin_wallet_api/. The project is in Rust (and the wallet lib can be linked directly,) but there's also an option to start up a wallet as a secure listener and communicate with the wallet API via JSON-RPC.

Nice to see the interest in Grin, and some appreciation for its main goals of minimalism, fair-launch and fair emission. And reciprocally, we're always in search of a better network for performing slatepack exchanges. If you have any questions or would just like to talk more, feel free to get in touch!

[markqvist]

Ah, thanks for pointing this out. I'm going to build some prototype out of that when time allows it :) Thanks a lot for offering your availability to answer questions, and likewise please feel free to ask as well!

The next while for me will be focused on the remaining missing pieces in the Reticulum ecosystem, but here is to hoping that we might be able to collaborate in some way in the not too distant future. The more I look into Grin, the more I like it. I would love to see the ability to perform slatepack exchanges over Reticulum.

[trosel]

posting Grin wallet API tutorials here for future reference: https://github.com/grincc/tutorial

[trosel]

The project is in Rust

Bumping this to say they there is now also a Python implementation https://github.com/grinventions/mimblewimble-py

Perhaps easier to work with since Reticulum is also in Python

[4c3e]

Semi-related: It would be really interesting if we generalize the "re-use" of Curve25519 points used in reticulum destinations. I imagine this would have tons of uses outside of grin, for example it could potentially enable the mapping of RNS destinations to interoperate with qaul.net destinations. (Or any other routing protocol that uses curve25519 destinations!). I need to read a bit more into it, but we already have the existing coordinates for use in reticulum, so it should be fairly straightforward to reuse them in other cryptographic routing protocols.

The value proposition of the qaul interoperability, imo, is that qaul.net optimizes for high-bandwidth wifi transports, so it's able to do almost-real-time ad-hoc mesh reorganization and spend a lot more bandwidth on routing announcements. It would act as an emergency transport to increase utility in crowds of mobile peers.

[trosel]

I suppose that is a question a bit beyond Reticulum itself.

For example, do you want to use the same endpoint for multiple services and let the context figure out what you want to do with it? Or do you want to have a unique endpoint for multiple services and have everything mapped in a third party app (something like Linktree) where you keep your addresses?

I tend to favor using real life metaphors and patterns wherever possible. Because of that, i think having multiple keys stored on a keyring that you keep secure is the most user friendly at the moment. Rather than some magical routing and context-determining happening programmatically at least.

[4c3e]

yeah good point. The only situation where it might be interesting would be some sort of messaging app where you could switch on qaulnet as an "emergency mode" or something, so everyone's contacts are already transferred over. Of course, you could also just pre-share everyone's separate qaulnet keys when you add each other as contacts so maybe not that useful, but a little fun! :)