Circulex

At present, payments are too centralized, and too prone to being spied on or choked off by authoritarian governments. Another consequence of centralization is that cross-border payments are unnecessarily expensive.

A number of proposed solutions involve distributed public databases, rather than a logically decentralized network. This isn’t ideal from a privacy perspective, and is still subject to effectively centralized decision-making about changes to the nature of the database.

The long-established Hawala system comes closest to solving this problem; an automated hawala-like network running over the internet could realize decentralization’s efficiency and privacy benefits, bringing them from hawala’s home around the Arabian Sea to people in the rest of the world, both those surviving under authoritarian governments, and those living in freer countries.

Eventually, the solution should scale up to payments of all sizes, in and between all currencies, and maybe even include other sorts of financial instruments.

Circulex aims to be this solution.

From here, you can:

• discuss circulex on social media (an XMPP app and account are required),
• watch a 90-second historical fundraising video that briefly explains circulex,
• read the poem from the video,
• download an incomplete draft of the circulex protocol,
• watch its development via the git protocol:
  • the specification,
  • this site, including the specification of chunky base $b$ encodings,
  • project planning,
  • the logo;
• and participate in its development by sending bug reports, patches, and so on, via XMPP or email.