A Twitter bot which issues its own currency

(Update: I’ve now taken my instance of the bot down, but the code should still work if you want to run your own.)

I spent some time this weekend putting together a proof-of-concept Twitter bot which issues its own “upvote” currency. You use it by tweeting something like the following:

@stellarjob +++@thegdb cool bot!

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The bot then walks the user through linking their Stellar account and extending trust for its +++ currency. Once the trust has been granted, the bot issues a +++ credit. Each subsequent upvote results in another +++ being issued.

Because the credits are issued on Stellar, they can be seen on the account viewer, or even traded on Stellar’s distributed exchange.

Code #

You can grab the code for the bot from Github. Disclaimer: this code is definitely the quickest implementation that could possibly work; please don’t judge me for it :).

Account linking #

One interesting aspect of the project is how the bot links your Stellar account. It asks the user to extend trust for a unique number of +++.

When it sees a trust line for the appropriate amount, it then asks the user to confirm that it’s in fact their Stellar account. (Initially, I was tempted to try doing this without the confirmation — I wanted to see how long it could go without someone intercepting someone else’s +++. Unfortunately, before I’d even finished initial testing, one curious observer ended up completing the linking flow on behalf of one of the test subjects.)

Stellar API calls #

The set of Stellar API calls here are as follows:

The bot just polls the Stellar API for changes in trust, though in principle it could use the WebSocket API to get streaming updates.

 
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