Under the Hood — Running Everything Together

In the previous post of the “Under the hood” series, I explained how payment requests work. In this post, I will show you how to install and run the full set of Swaptacular network nodes on your laptop.

A fair warning: This post may become too technical for the taste of some readers.

Automated Currency Exchanges

I am happy to announce that after months of hard work, I have successfully implemented a service that creditors agents can install and run, which can perform automatic exchanges between gazillion of currencies, without using a “master” reserve currency.

For quite some time now, the My wallet app has allowed users to set exchange policies for the currencies in their wallets, so that the creditors agent could arrange mutually beneficial currency exchanges between users:

Under the Hood — Payment Requests

In a previous post I explained how Swaptacular’s digital coins work. In this post, I will talk about payment requests.

In the general sense, a request for payment (or a payment request) refers to any communication sent out to customers asking for them to pay for goods and services.

Under the Hood — Digital Coins

In a previous post I outlined how Swaptacular’s Payments Web API works. In this post, I will talk about Swaptacular’s digital coins.

Every Swaptacular currency is uniquely identified by its debtor ID (a 64-bit integer number). In principal, the only thing that you need to know in order to create an account with a given currency, is the currency’s debtor ID. In practice however, before you decide to create an account, you will want to see more information about the currency: the name of the currency, the currency unit, the exchange rate with other currencies, etc.

Under the Hood — Payments Web API

In a previous post I explained how the Swaptacular Messaging Protocol works, demonstrating the most important use cases.

In this post I will talk about the server Web API that currency holders’ client applications use to communicate with creditors agent nodes.

Under the Hood — SMP

In a previous post I explained how peers in Swaptacular’s network use the STOMP message transport protocol, to send Swaptacular Messaging Protocol messages to each other.

In this post will try to explain how the Swaptacular Messaging Protocol (SMP) works.

Under the Hood — Message Transport

In a previous post I explained how peers in Swaptacular’s network can establish authenticated SSL/TLS connections between themselves.

In this post, I will continue this thread, and will explain how the servers use the authenticated connections between the peers to send messages to each other.

Under the Hood — Peer Connections

In a series of posts, starting with this one, I will try to explain how different things in Swaptacular work “under the hood”, hopefully without requiring a degree in computer science from the reader.

The topic of this post is: How peers in Swaptacular’s network set up reliable connections between themselves?

Interest Rates in Swaptacular

In Spectacular, the issuer of each digital currency can publicly declare an interest rate, which will be applied to all accounts in the given currency. For example: If I create my own currency, and I declare an interest rate of 5% on it, then for everyone that holds my currency (and therefore I owe them something in return), every year, there will be an automatic 5% increase in the amount that I owe them.

Swaptacular's Network of Trust

Imagine this: Paul is an owner of a restaurant. The business is good. Many people love Paul’s restaurant. Unfortunately, the old, but very expensive ventilation system has stopped working, and needs to be replaced. Paul applies for a bank loan. They make him sign a bunch of documents with lots of fine-print. Paul has no choice but to trust them. From now on, Paul and the bank are “partners”.

Sounds familiar?