Chat on #swig for September 28, 2014 - Melvin's Discussion of Bitmark

It all started when Melvin Carvalho was using a hubot called klaranet on IRC which was awarding kudos to those in the room. It was another day on Freenode's #swig channel. He talked to me about his excitement about bitmark, a new form of crypto-currency, which is used by klaranet.

Bitmark's aim is to integrate crypto-currencies and RESTful principles with 5-star linked data. In its implementation, it uses URIs, which can be integrated with Payswarm, WebCredits (see also wiki), and Bitcoin. Bitmarks can be sent from URIs to other URIs, with the record of their movement stored as RDF. These URIs can then be used in IRC with klaranet. Bitmarks can also be sent to IRC nicknames (supposedly identifiers as Melvin described them), which can be authorized through registration with the network (at least on Freenode). In addition, Melvin believes that personas, which can be URIs describing people, will be tied together with owl:SameAs. From the discussion, it seems unclear if IRC nicknames can also refer to URIs.

In short he says the key of what he said was, "Apply the principals of Web Architecture and Fielding’s REST to cryptographic currency, in order to become truly decentralized and scale without limits"

The Bitmark project started only recently, as indicated by the Bitcoin talk forum,  and so far it has been doing quite well. A recent interview about Bitmark is also available at Bitcoinist.