BitCommons is inspired by the countless times that communities such as dormitories, student societies, or co-workers find themselves short of a good way to pay each other back. Paying online requires a credit or debit card with inevitable transaction fees while cash is inexact and not always on hand. In this space, Bitcoin has great potential because it is nearly instant, decentralized, and has few transaction fees.
BitCommons is a web wallet and visualizer built on the Coinbase API that aims to make community payments as straightforward as possible. Once community members join BitCommons and link their Coinbase accounts, users can send Bitcoin directly to each others' names, eliminating the hassle of sharing bitcoin addresses. Transaction amounts are translated between USD and BTC seamlessly on the client side, and sending is done with just one click.
Once a transaction is made, a Yo is sent out to all subscribed members of the community, and the transaction table is updated with the new entry. Using a Rails rake task, BitCommons queries the Coinbase API for new intra-community transactions and adds them to the transaction table every five minutes. Annotation of transactions is integrated through the API.
The highlight of BitCommons is the live graph representation of Bitcoin flow within the network, where each member is represented as a node and connections between nodes represent net bitcoin transfer in certain directions. This can be very useful to communities for monitoring which members have been paying the most or the least, as well as any pending reimbursements.
The graph view also has potential in extensibility and abstraction. For example, if a BitCommons instance monitors Bitcoin flow for a dormitory on campus, that dormitory's network can be abstracted as a supernode in a network with all other dormitories on campus in another BitCommons instance. The dormitory network could also be zoomed in as the a network between all floors in the dormitory.
Built With
- coffeescript
- coinbase-api
- foundationdb
- jquery
- nginx
- ruby-on-rails
- sass
- sqlite
- unicorn
- web
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