Why Do We Need to Engineer an Open-Source Financial Exchange?

I try hard to close my ears everytime I’m around the coffee shop whenever some people talk about how Bitcoin prices go up or down. I still miss the days when in the development of the Cryptocurrency network it was computer scientists and Wallstreet quants who are hardcore C++ programmers (see Bitcoin source code tree here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin). Back then it was a small libertarian community who were just really passionate about building an electronic cash that is an alternative of the government’s fiat system. Nowadays, the community is full of people who care more about the daily or even microsecond price swings.

We’ve let go the sense of purpose of why we built this technology in the first place. See Satoshi Nakamoto’s letter here http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source and whitepaper here http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.

Let me remind the community again of the duty we have. It’s our job to make sure we keep the revolution going on. We have a really big problem right now with exchanges that are poorly designed, written on crappy Python code with poorly designed security measures. Massive scale bitcoin hacks from Mt. Gox to the recent Coinrail hack. One solution to this problem is to simply design a financial exchange that is open-sourced so a lot of parties could delve and contribute towards the project.

Writing one is a very counter-intuitive thing to do. Building an electronic exchange itself means forgoing a cost of more than millions of dollars of research and development. I know, although I believe it is the right thing to do right now to build the sense of purpose of myself as a part of the community.

As a double-edged sword could be, this technology could also be used for many purposes. One that I could think of is to circumvent currency controls or another one to transition future banking systems to cryptocurrency operations.

In tough times, governments all around the world try to suppress the will of the citizen’s to convert local currency to foreign currencies by enforcing what is called a currency control. For examples of currency controls see Indonesia 1998–1999 https://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/global/conf/pdfs/nasut.pdf or Greece recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_controls_in_Greece or maybe soon to the Turkish Lira https://www.ft.com/content/ca856e24-580d-11e8-bdb7-f6677d2e1ce8. What if we could give the power back to the people. Give a local organization that could have local cash ready on hand to run an exchange, one could spawn an exchange within minutes and allow free-flow capital from within the country to outside within nanoseconds. That would cripple the policy of currency control in the first place.

Or let’s say we don’t want to be that political here. There are no ways that banking systems would not move to virtual currency infrastructure in the future. One way to secure that transition for a good collective effort is to implement a safe wallet and exchange system. One which we could build together.

Aside from writing deep learning research papers and I think this would be a good portion to dedicating my spare time with. I’ve started writing the software here https://github.com/bitwyre here.

Contributions welcome!

Originally published at Deep Learning Research Blog.