Move $10 through the Swarm Redistribution campaign to test the network and micro-fund development

Published in

Keeping Stock

6 min readJan 2, 2017

Update: New contract deployed,
https://medium.com/@resilience_me/swarm-redistribution-live-experiment-round-2-52b461de9a48#.12qow4cwa

Update: This campaign is closed, and I’ve developed a new Swarm Redistribution contract, which has lower gas costs,
https://gist.github.com/resilience-me/1500caf64411db16e375630dfc17b1ea

Swarm Redistribution uses transaction pathways to redistribute wealth in the form of basic income. Tax is collected on each transaction, and sent through webs of dividend pathways, similar to how blood flows through arteries, or electricity through our cities.

Swarm Redistribution lets people, literally, grow their own taxes.

Using Swarm Redistribution to micro-fund the developer

It’s a real-world proof-of-concept, which lets anyone who is interested in my invention test it in a setting which is very similar to how it would work at a global scale. It uses a 2% transaction tax, and a 0% exchange tax so it is cost-free to withdraw from the campaign.

The campaign is public, hosted on a smart-contract on Ethereum, and can be audited on https://etherscan.io/address/0x95c2906debbb9203ff7007f26c2f00a936c77b5d#code.

How the campaign works

The campaign uses the Proof-of-Concept from https://steemit.com/basicincome/@johan-nygren/smart-contract-for-swam-redistribution-using-flat-tax-180-lines-of-code, except the only human in the system is me, and it includes the function buyViaJohan(), which simulates that I would have sent RES to you, and creates a dividend pathway from me to you.

The first buyer of RES used buyViaJohan() to exchange 2 ETH for 2 RES. This is the transaction, public and transparent,
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x89ed412cc79278da1d673b71f01bc2c4ab4689b7bfb956902e5491aa12bc1e2a

Since they (0x4eb32b83b90539484ef13be448aaf2d916990f4a) used buyViaJohan(), I now have a dividend pathway to 0x4eb32b83b90539484ef13be448aaf2d916990f4a (etherscan.io). Whenever they make a transaction with RES, they will grow a pathway to the receiver, and my pathway is connected to theirs. If that pathway-chain continues to grow, it forms what I call a branching scheme, and generates tax which is distributed to the humans within that swarm (me in this case).

The dividend pathways then decay as tax flows through them.

Buy ETH

ETH can be bought for Bitcoin or any other crypto on http://shapeshift.io, or for fiat with http://coinbase.com

Using Ethereum-wallet to interact with the smart-contract

Download Ethereum-wallet and sync it with the blockchain.

Then go to Watch Contract to add the Swarm Redistribution smart-contract

Add the CONTRACT ADDRESS 0x6846b938f9be9f1eeeb9bfd853636c805f8f54d3

and paste this into JSON INTERFACE, then press OK

How to buy, transfer, and sell RES

RES can be bought via either the buy function, which does not generate a pathway from me to you and which is therefore kind of pointless since there are no other humans in this campaign, or, via buyViaJohan()

BuyViaJohan() increases your RES balance with the amount of ETH you sent along, and creates a dividend pathway from me to you. (example)

To transfer your RES to someone else, use transfer(_to, _value)

Transfer() will create a dividend pathway from you to the receiver, and, in case humans are connected to you or them, send tax into those dividend pathways which is then divided on the humans (in this case, me). If no humans exist within the web of pathways which the tax is sent to, then the tax is returned.

sell() lets you exchange RES for ETH 1:1. Since this is just a campaign to test Swarm Redistribution and to micro-fund me, there is no exchange tax (which is otherwise used to dis-incentivize moving capital out of the network).

With Ethereum Wallet, you can view things like dividend pathways

and balances

and how much basic income I have received

and you can also use a block-explorer like http://etherscan.io to view these things

How to interact with the contract using MyEtherWallet

With MyEtherWallet you can send transactions to the Swarm Redistribution contract, and you can include the bytecode to call functions like buyViaJohan(), transfer() or sell()

To buyViaJohan(), include 0x8ac0ca36 in the data field of the transaction.

To sell(), use the data 0xe4849b320000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001bc16d674ec80000 and replace 1bc16d674ec80000 with the hex for the _value you want to sell.

To transfer() use 0xa9059cbb000000000000000000000000703a0457a5c2c0beef1ebe833ac6f8ac7b7dd6540000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000de0b6b3a7640000 and replace 1bc16d674ec80000 with the hex for the amount you want to send, and replace 703a0457a5c2c0beef1ebe833ac6f8ac7b7dd654 with the address you want to transfer to.

Campaign goal of sorts

So for this Swarm Redistribution campaign, if $5000 were to move through the network, then that would generate $100 in crowd funding, which would show the concepts being used IRL

100 $50 transactions, or 500 $10 transactions. If you are making a micro-payment to someone who is currency agnostic, then you could give RES a try.

Would make a great headline. “Decentralized Basic Income Swarm grew its own taxes”.

The results could be graphed, similar to this, and would give an introduction to the network.

For the first couple of transactions, use small amounts, in case there are bugs.

Feel free to AMA in chat over Facebook or some other channel.

Why this campaign ?

The identity systems required to use Swarm Redistribution at a large scale are not yet developed, but Microsoft and ConsenSys with their http://uport.me are making progress on that. This could be a way to test the concepts, while micro-funding me, and is a real-world alternative to just running tests on test nets. Moving real capital, and seeing it grow taxes which fund another human being, in a P2P fashion, could possibly be worth the time and money required to partake in the campaign.