Building a Crypto Weed App: The Proposal
Why I am building a crypto oracle to track the price of weed (cluutch.io)
Index (updated 2/13/21)
Part 1 - Working Anonymously (first paid post, WIP)
Part 2 - Barebones API: Set up a bare bones Rails server
Part 3 - Going Live: Deploy site to Herkou
Part 4 - Pretty Things: Make site look good and SEO optimized
Part 5 - But Really, How Much: Prices in specific locations
Part 6 - Is Augur the best oracle for cluutch: Crypto oracle comparison
Part 7 - To mTurk, or not to mTurk: Assessing options for crowdsourcing prices
Part 8 - Getting stuck with Augur: Learned a lot, but…
Intro
Note: This is a very new project and I keep changing things. I started on Patreon. Going to try out Substack now. Will copy the first episodes and wirte a new one here.
I am a high school teacher with some programming experience. I’ve followed many many technical walkthroughs in the past. This is my first attempt to write one myself. These are a few goals of this project:
Release something. Be outcome oriented.
Learn more about crypto.
Learn more about Tor and other darknets.
Obey all laws. Don't get caught by my students.
Document the process.
Ideal output
Weekly blog post
Weekly release
In the spirit of being outcome oriented, I'm going to assume the reader has a working knowledge of all the concepts above. If not, there's DuckDuckGo. If this page gets any traction, I'll break down some of this more.
The Idea
"Coming up cluutch since 2021"
A crypto oracle that gives information about marijuana prices would check all of these boxes. Unfortunately, I have no experience implementing an oracle or determining weed prices. The first version of the tool will have to be a traditional HTTP API and then iterate from there.
Action plan
Setup tools and anonymous accounts
Weed Price API
Make daily weed prices available over a HTTP API
Expose over Tor
Increase update frequency and attributes tracked
Accept user input
3. Weed Price Oracle: Details TBD
On deck
In my first paid posting, I'll talk about how I setup a new anonymous* identity for work on this project. This will include recommendations on:
VPN
Email
Phone
Crypto transactions
Domain registration
Analytics
Brand creation
Virtual machine setup
Source control management
* I'm trying to do this all quick and dirty. Of course if I thought my adversary was the NSA, I would do a lot more. This is for instructional purposes only.
But while that work is under progress, you can already check out the next post in the series: Building a Weed App from Scratch: Part 2 - Barebones API.