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!
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:
- Retrieve the set of trustlines for the stellarjob account via
account_lines - Submitting a TrustSet for the stellarjob account (initiated by the end-user)
- Send the actual
+++credit by submitting a Payment - Reverse-resolve the detected account to a username
The bot just polls the Stellar API for changes in trust, though in principle it could use the WebSocket API to get streaming updates.