I’ve been thinking about doing almost exactly the same idea as Duniter for a few years now. I called it ID Coin, I got a Facebook, Twitter & a domain name for it (id-co.in). I did a little work with & had some discussion with the Namecoin team before. I Struggled to get many other people involved & then shelved the idea as caring for my disabled father took over my life.
I’m glad to see some progress has been made & I’d like to help with your project now that I’m free of family commitments (father is in a nursing home now).
Well … this is a free project, you can participate if you want to. But I am not sure what you wanted to develop was the same thing as us, the WoT is not the main goal of our system. Instead, what we want is libre currency, and this imply for us to use a WoT.
Anyway, if you want to dive in you can have a look at :
I’m pretty sure I wanted to develop the same thing, or close enough. Decentralised basic income was the main goal, ID verification & preventing duplicate identities are requirements, but that adds a useful feature too, for authentication for other services.
Implementing a web of trust that is resistant to Sybil attacks is the biggest technical challenge, so I chose a name that focussed on that. Providing a free currency with a basic income & more sensible economics behind money creation (compared to bitcoin) was always my main aim.
I wanted to replace proof of work with proof of a unique identity & allocate newly minted coins to people who had proved their identity & run a node to support the network.
Namecoin already has data storage, they had a standard for storing identity information & a Firefox addon for website authentication. I was going to add web of trust verification to Namecoin & work from there. It seems you’ve made more progress.
Well we are doing everything “from scratch”. We do not use any external API or anything else There are many reasons to it, that I will not describe here.
You should try Duniter software and join our Testnet currency to take a look at the current state of affairs. Also, you could read past talks we had on the forum.
Generally, we are speaking a bit too much french and it’s not easy for world wide people to join us, so do not hesitate to ask questions We are available on xmpp too, almost 24/24.
I will have to spend some time reading & learning French I only found the project this morning after somebody mentioned it in passing.
I was only going to start with Namecoin to have a base to build an experimental web of trust on a blockchain to help find ways to overcome Sybil attacks, before starting a new currency & allocating coins based on identities.
I will try out the testnet later, I have a spare kimsufi server to try it out on.
OK then you are close from what we want to do, indeed
Libre currency is way more deep than just basic income though … if you want to really understand the whole thing, you will probably want to read the RTM which Duniter is built upon on the economic side.
There are many reasons to it, that I will not describe here.