Zero Reserve - A distributed Bitcoin exchange

18 Sep 2013

      Zero Reserve - A distributed Bitcoin exchange

tl;dr: Proposal and prototype for a distributed exchange not requiring a banking gateway. Implemented as a plugin for Retroshare. Licensed under the LGPL.

The Achilles heel of Bitcoin is the exchanges. Centralized as they are, they can be shut down by a number of means, by a number of players. Should that happen, price discovery of Bitcoin will not work any more. To address that, we offer a distributed exchange without the need of the banking system. Some intro and marketing blurb is here:
https://github.com/zeroreserve/ZeroReserve/wiki

A tech paper is here:
https://mega.co.nz/#!vZ80yQJS!ccrCBREYZrOPr8oK7C9StVGuDmYENNYwrFiPXZVQldM

And the code is here:
https://github.com/zeroreserve/ZeroReserve

In short, ZR uses the Ripple idea of Ryan Fugger to get money in and out of the exchange. ZR has nothing to do whatsoever with ripple.com, however. As such, there is no need for XRP. There is no pre-mining, no company, just code.

Now the caveat: This is prototype software. Anything may or may not work. Security is only what the underlying Retroshare provides. The distributed order book works, but is still insecure. Currencies are therefore only defunct or fantasy currencies such as German Papermark(1923). Nothing you do has any effect on the blockchain.
The next steps are:
- hook up to the blockchain (using Amir Taaki’s excellent libbitcoin)
- providing basic wallet functionality
- provide authentication for anything beyond F2F.

I see no reason why it wouldn’t work on OSX, but ZR was never built on it. It does build and run on Linux and Windows, though.

Once you are on Retroshare and have some friends, you should be able to use this link to get and subscribe to the Zero Reserve Forum:
retroshare://forum?name=ZeroReserve&id=b87d0a5577ced312d88a0ee8176e24a1

One of my RS identities:

Zero Reserve - A distributed Bitcoin exchange

Eugen Leitl