Home

Awesome

RSCoin: A scalable distributed cryptographic currency framework

RSCoin proposes¹ a framework to implement centrally banked monetary systems based on cryptographic methods in such way that it is possible for a system which uses RSCoin framework to meet every of the following criteria:

  1. System can handle massive amount of users and scales well;
  2. Transaction times are comparable to those of MasterCard and other payment systems that issue plastic cards;
  3. The system is auditable and transparent for all the users;
  4. The system allows rapid payments in which instruments are sent between two or more commercial banks or other payment systems, which don't have a partnership agreement. It is so because compliance is ensured by protocol and no direct communication between the systems of those banks or payment systems is required.
  5. For central banks and other possible governors of monetary supply, RSCoin provides a way to focus on this, off-loading transaction handling to commercial banks and other governed entities
  6. With a simple extension, RSCoin provides a way to perform extremely fast international transactions with no need for manual work and correspondent banks;.

This repository

This repository is the first full implementation of RSCoin framework, as well as its application in form of working deployable system. In this implementation authors tried to follow paper by Dr. Danezis and Dr. Meiklejohn as close as possible.

Platform support

At the moment, the only supported platform is Linux. Mac OS X isn't officially supported, but it should be possible to deploy and run RSCoin on Mac OS X the same way as it is done on Linux.

Windows will be supported at some point, but for now we don't have a milestone for that.

Installation

At the moment, RSCoin has binary distribution served from our servers through Nix² package manager³. To perform automatic installation, please run the script which you can find in this repository under admin/install.sh.

To build from source, clone this repository, navigate to the directory into which the project was cloned and run stack build there.

To build with web frontend support run stack build --flag rscoin:befrontend. To build with gui support run stack build --flag rscoin:gtkgui.

Running

To understand how to run central bank, mintettes and user nodes, please refer to admin/demo script. It is the simplest script which runs just two mintettes, central bank and allows you to perform transactions in bank-mode. In order to get a more sophisticated layout with more than one user and nine mintettes, please refer to script admin/demo9.

We also have testing and benchmarking.

# Full tests, run 3 times
stack test rscoin --test-arguments '--match "Test.RSCoin.Full" -a 3'
# All other tests
stack test rscoin --test-arguments '--skip "Test.RSCoin.Full"'
# And that's how to run bench:
stack bench rscoin:rscoin-bench-local --benchmark-arguments "--users 2 --mintettes 1"

References

¹ — G. Danezis and S. Meiklejohn, “Centrally Banked Cryptocurrencies”

² — E. Dolstra et al, “Nix: A Safe and Policy-Free System for Software Deployment”

³ — NixOS Foundation, Nix Package Manager