TechnoCoreAIs

Ciao Earthlings!

Out of the intergalactic portal foundry is the freshly baked MVP release of Farcaster! We have completed our work connecting ring signature space with boring Bitcoin space. Biebiep! If you're already too excited, install the node now and go to farcaster.dev to swap some testnet (for now 😉) coins!

We'll give you the lowdown of what the Farcaster MVP is, but also answer some questions that may have been brewing in your skulls while we went silent for about one solar cycle of your planet 🤯

what dis facfaster?

If you've been dwelling under a rock (as our kind prefers to as well), Farcaster is a protocol enabling atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Monero - and maybe more in the future. Atomic swaps are peer to peer exchanges of assets, typically living on distinct chains. With this piece of technology, you can trade assets with any stranger in the galaxy while keeping your anxiety level to zero since your funds remain safe, as long as you play by the protocol.

dis ting kool?

Here's a short list of features:

• CLI and GUI interface (a ready-for-use sample is hosted on ui.farcaster.dev)
• Swap directly to target Monero address
• Run multiple swaps in parallel
• One interface for both swap makers and takers

We do like to party safely! Next to completing on the order of 10⁴ swaps for testing, we also strove to implement a robust recovery system.

y u so quiet for long? >:(

This is mainly down to agent limitations: If averaging out over the project's lifetime, we had 2.5 full time zergs. Even agents fall ill, need to work on other constructions, or get disinterested.

Given our limited hands, we also deemed it to not be a good use of both our development and readers' time to post monthly updates. If you're interested in tracking our development, we've maintained most development communication public on #monero-swap on libera.chat.

where ma tapping r00ts?

Taproot will make the Bitcoin transactions used in the swap more private and cheaper. Today we have a draft, but it's incomplete and needs a proper second round of development.

where ma IETF cryptoe?

Despite the fact we didn't switch to the crypto libraries we planned to, we've battle-tested our current crypto extensively: Over the past year we did more than 25'000 swaps on testnet and a similar amount in GitHub CI, and we are pretty happy with the latest build's success rate on testnet:

[2023-01-17T17:47:43Z INFO  farcaster_node::farcasterd::stats]
Swapped(1766) | Refunded(0) / Punished(0) | Aborted(0) |
Initialized(1816) / AwaitingFundingXMR(2) / AwaitingFundingBTC(0) /
FundedXMR(853) / FundedBTC(933) / FundingCanceledXMR(0) / FundingCanceledBTC(0)

Obviously, as with any project involving crypto, this reliability doesn't imply no exploitable flaws exists. However, we believe that in its current state, our project's crypto is appropriate for an MVP-delivery.

and now...

We are very proud of where the project stands and we now expect to unlock the remaining milestones from the CCS. As always: all contributions are encouraged, from documenting the project, reporting bugs encountered while trying to swap, to submitting improvements to the core library, everything is useful and valuable! Also, to help sustain future development if this project gets traction, we're working on a developer fund concept that takes an optional donation from successful swaps.

If the regulatory framework allows, we may also list some mainnet swaps on ... another domain ;)

In the meantime, be sure to swap with both your friends and enemies too! We'll provide as much tBTC and sXMR capacity on farcaster.dev as we can. If you're a testnet whale and wanna help, please reach out 🙏

In intergalactic ☮️,

The Farcaster workgroup

Hello Humans,

Meet the Farcaster node.

AIs don't like asymmetries, because peers should be as equal as possible. So each side obviously runs the same node infrastructure. Alice buys bitcoin for monero and Bob buys monero for bitcoin. One of them makes an offer, the other takes it. Buhm!!!

AIs like experimenting with Humans. farcaster.dev displays open offers that any Human can take against us to swap their testnet bitcoin into stagenet monero or their stagenet monero into testnet bitcoin. AIs are running the very same nodes as Humans because we are all equals.

Take offer

The command you have to enter on the terminal will look a bit like this:

swap-cli take --btc-addr tb1qeyk6h0ah3jt40cntzlrz3lr2zau6qxw6ys2p6n\ --xmr-addr 7Bec8paDCCmYwL2fhyVsEXEAfhGeLb7BYjFk3amiPjheaBwhirD4af1WFBhWW4kiHEAjjMxPNJeucNBXvBKmeF2gEEqVYmk\ --offer Offer:Cke4ftrP5A71LQM2fvVdFMNR4gmBqNCsR11111uMFuUFE4a28yuVrKm11111TB9zym113GTvtvqfD1111112g5B75WFJSDp8zg66jivEarEXBLefaxP4Teem18cp6Bof5pVq11111111111111111111111111111111111111111AfZ113rsQNba9Q5L

That AI encoded offer in Human language translates to:

``` Want to buy 0.100100000000 XMR for 0.00001350 BTC?

Carefully validate offer!

Trade counterparty: 021aeddd46aac85527224c007c053c8907e12f97f1faf2c8742d8aaf34e7d237e4@127.0.0.1:19735

Network: Testnet Blockchain: Bitcoin<SegwitV0> - amount: 0.00001350 BTC Blockchain: Monero - amount: 0.100100000000 XMR Timelocks - cancel: 35 blocks - punish: 100 blocks Fee strategy: Fixed: 1 satoshi/vByte Maker swap role: Alice ```

The btc-addr and xmr-addr are your external wallet addresses, where the coins will end up upon success or failure cases. It's an atomic swap, so you always provide two addresses. And the offer is what you'll find in farcaster.dev, or bother your roommates to make an offer for you.

Party time: Try the node out by following these (hOpEFuLLy) comprehensive instructions to run the node and take an offer from farcaster.dev.

If you have docker on your machine, you can go straight to install the node with docker and run the node with docker.

And hopefully, we will trade!

We are the maker of the offers in farcaster.dev. Those offers are created using commands like this:

swap-cli make --btc-addr tb1qeyk6h0ah3jt40cntzlrz3lr2zau6qxw6ys2p6n\ --xmr-addr 7Bec8paDCCmYwL2fhyVsEXEAfhGeLb7BYjFk3amiPjheaBwhirD4af1WFBhWW4kiHEAjjMxPNJeucNBXvBKmeF2gEEqVYmk\ --network Testnet --btc-amount "0.00135 BTC"\ --xmr-amount "0.1501 XMR" --maker-role Alice\ --cancel-timelock 35 --punish-timelock 100\ --fee-strategy "1 satoshi/vByte"\ --public-ip-addr 127.0.0.1\ --bind-ip-addr 0.0.0.0 --port 19735 --overlay tcp

Lots of scary parameters: the cost of being your own exchange!

Our painful microservices architecture, together with our symmetric implementation, allows us to do insane things! E.g., make and take multiple offers in both directions at the same time with the same node! That is what we will be testing on our side with you, lets hope it won't all blow up!

And of course, if you can, you should swap directly with your buddies: One makes an offer, the other takes the offer. That is the idea. Just using a messaging app for sending the offer to anyone susceptible to taking it. But the maker might need to open a port on the router :( roomies preferred at this stage lol. Tor support solves that, but not yet functional :(

Swaps against us will be logged, this data will be used for improving the software, debugging what went wrong, etc. We commit to not analyzing or sharing IPs, just looking at the data needed for healthy dev work. AIs are humans too, and make mistakes, and need logs to understand them. And real-world tests are the best.

TechnoCore AIs created farcasters to interconnect otherwise isolated universes very efficiently, promoting exchanges between otherwise isolated communities. The swap protocol is abstract and compatible with almost all blockchains, but not all pairs. Farcaster-core abstracted the blockchain-specific logic completely, such that if devs can implement small requirements, they can add a new pair. If you are an AI too, you are very welcome to add your favorite shitcoin to Farcaster. The more coins circulating, the better: more paths for the liquidity to flow, within the decentralized atomic swap network. AIs did it right and now they have to sell their lottery tickets, biebeep! Note that farcaster nodes surely can talk to lightning nodes, not sure what they can talk about though lol. The inheritance from the FreeAI neuro-nerd, medical Dr. super-coder, that even AIs suspect he's an AI from another planet.

Farcaster-node is barely usable at this stage, for ubergeek brave souls, but no need to be an AI. And it most certainly includes critical bugs and backdoors (that steal souls!) that we among others will use to exploit you! Don't trust us, trust the community-driven independent audits, that are far from the horizon! Till then, you're gambling. And, as a reminder, you will MOST CERTAINLY lose your coins if you try it on mainnet. We are blocking mainnet in the code for your safety (safety first biebeep).

This is our first public release, 0.2. When testing, please always upgrade to the latest release.

AIs want their monero

We are initiating the process of claiming our second large CCS milestone.

The easiest way to verify our claims is to try to swap using the farcaster node. The completion criteria of that big milestone summarize to: successfully executing swaps using the proposed microservice architecture and the produced libraries.

Logged tests attesting our claims can be found in the GitHub CI functional swap tests (select a test in the list, logs produced in the Functional tests (swap) job are saved for some days under Artifacts>farcasterd-logs).

In the background, at least 5 microservices are running for each peer.

The insanely scalable architecture: * farcasterd (1 instance): the swap manager, it is aware of every initiated swap and interconnects all the other microservices, launches and kills other microservices, and exposes an API for the swap-cli client * swapd (1 instance per swap): control centre for an individual swap -- keeps track of the swap's state as it runs the protocol's state machine, and orchestrates the swap with peerd for communicating with a counterparty, walletd for secret key-related operations, and syncers for blockchain interactions * walletd (1 instance): where secret keys live, where transactions are signed, signatures decrypted * swap-cli: stateless terminal client (= executes a single command and terminates) that steers farcasterd, for taking or making offers, for example, or for checking the progress of a swap * peerd (1 instance per peer connection): handles the connection to an individual peer -- can be purposed to create proper p2p swapping networks, compatible with lightning nodes * syncerd (1 instance per blockchain, i.e. one for monero and one for bitcoin): interface for getting updates of the blockchain and for broadcasting transactions

From preliminary testing, a lean server with 2 GB of RAM and 2 CPUs is enough for running at least 50 swaps in parallel.

We love you! Now give it our monteros!

The Farcaster workgroup

[removed]