YadaCoin — first monthly development update — 9/2018!
Available on ios!
The long awaited app store approval finally happened and absolutely grueling experience with iTunes Connect making, what I believe to be, spurious demands in an attempt to deter me from releasing the app. First rejection the app was declared a medium to exchange a virtual currency, ok, removed those features. Rejected again, then the app didn’t have any flagging or reporting features to “protect” “my users” from “objectionable content.” What this means is that Apple has ultimate control over the behavior of the users that use the YadaCoin app. If a user reports another user or a piece of content is flagged, and I don’t remove it, guess who makes me remove it or threatens to remove my app from the app store? Apple. Several more rejections followed but I just kept after it and swore I would never stop submitting my app until they finally just told me, “no.” Which they sort of attempted to do with one of the rejections stating that my app, “wasn’t useful or unique.” Which essentially boiled down to me writing a more exaggerated product description. As an engineer, I thought “uncensored socail media” sounded enticing enough.
New Logo!
Fiverr is an awesome place and I was able to get a logo created on the cheap just to have something visual to associate YadaCoin with.

Explainer video!
To help developers understand what we’re up against. We can’t beat big tech individually but together we certainly can. All we need to do is work together to deliver a user experience that cannot be delivered by a centralized social media giant. Watch the video for more information!
Legal memo
Currently working with attorneys to obtain documents required by exchanges for listing YadaCoin. That is going well and I expect this to be completed in a week or two.
Once listed on exchanges, YadaCoin will have real-world value and thus all interactions from applications built on YadaCoin will a quantifiable value as well. Status updates, direct messages, and friend requests will finally mean something since an investment will be made at every turn, just like real life.
Alex Jones de-platforming and big tech
As much as I’d love to take a break and enjoy summer, I’m just seeing too much demand and urgency for this technology. The excuse being used is, “these are private companies and they can do what they want.” This is absolutely true and it’s up to the free market to create alternatives for those who are dissatisfied. So here comes Yada!
Available on Android
Android was not difficult to get approved. I’m thrilled that the Google Play store is so supportive and open to new technology. I did not have to remove features or implement needless ones.
Elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman
I’ve been dealing heavily with direct messaging. In the case of YadaCoin, I was always wondering how to get a shared key between two parties with no medium for the exchange. I pondered this in the back of my mind off and on for many years until I realized I was asking the wrong question. YadaCoin had always been a P2P social media solution but the realization came when realizing that the blockchain is decentralized but also is a shared database. In a chance happening, I re-watched a Diffie-Hellman key exchange video once more just to see if it had any relevance to YadaCoin. I saw that both parties generate a number which can be displayed publicly and as long as the the private keys remain hidden, a shared secret can be derived from the private and public numbers. My mind was blown. The whole time I was searching for a way to exchange a shared secret when all that was needed was to openly share numbers which construct the shared secret. Amazing.
So learning more about x25519 key exchange was not easy, as I first was using a non-elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman which, in JavaScript, was terribly slow; we’re talking minutes to generate keys. So after discovering x25519, key generation times fell to sub-second levels and all ways merry again.
Searching for help
As much as I want to hog the lime light, it sure would be great to have some extra eyes on this code. So if you’re reading this and know either Python or Angular 2, let’s chat and see if we can work together!
