Loom Electronic Accounting System

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:53:31 GMT  <== Loom ==> 

Loom.cc is Patrick Chkoreff's general-purpose digital accounting system. It enables creation of asset types, and accounts in each type. It is basically a huge, sparsely-populated spreadsheet, with 2^128 rows and 2^128 columns. Each column is an asset type. Each row is a "folder". Each "location" (spreadsheet cell) holds a single 128-bit number. The "issuer" location for each column contains a negative number, initial -1, and the other locations hold positive numbers. The sum of all the locations in a column is always -1. Units of each asset are created by decrementing the issuer location and incrementing another location. Your folder is a location for each asset that you hold.

You buy a location by exchanging "usage tokens", asset number 0, with the loom system. You must be given the location of some usage tokens to buy your folder and exchange locations. You trade with another user by one of you purchasing an exchange location, then moving funds from your personal folder to that location, and telling the other person the exchange location. You can then release the exchange location, and get back the usage tokens you used to purchase it, or continue to use it for exchanges with the other party.

The system allows you to assign names to locations, so that you can easily recognize them. It also provides transaction history, if you enable it.

Security is through secrecy of the locations. Given how hard it is to guess a 128-bit number, that's pretty good security. There's even an on-screen keyboard for typing location numbers, to make it harder for keystroke loggers. You're still trusting the security of https encryption, and, most of all, you're trusting the security and integrity of loom.cc. Caveat emptor.

I have not yet discovered any way to get an "invitation" location, containing usage tokens required to create your initial folder, though the e-gold vendors who use loom.cc will likely provide that.

Some of the articles about the Loom system say that it's open source, but I haven't found any links to the source. The grid itself could be implemented as a B-Tree, living in a single file, but Patrick Chkoreff likely used a commercial database.

Interesting links:

loom.cc news
loom.cc grid documentation
loom.cc archive documentation
loom.cc grid interface

dgcblog video tutorial
vertoro.com tutorial
PayPerCPM tutorial
StevensGold.com tutorial

DGC Blog Loom articles
Digital Money World Loom articles
DGC Magazine

CyberspaceATM, another Loom implementation
GoldNow, a place to buy usage tokens?

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Comments (2):

Loom Rocks

Submitted by Mark on Mon, 31 Dec 2007 22:33:55 GMT

The Loom software is the absolute coolest thing I've ever seen.

Mark

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See my Loom page

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:15:57 GMT

See my Loom page at billstclair.com/loom. You'll find there an index to all my Loom articles, PHP and Java client libraries, a PHP rendition of Loom's programmer's tutorial pages, an iPhone interface, and links to other Loom-related web sites. More to come.

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