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Free money always drives the cryptocurrency world crazy, even if people don’t know how much the new cryptocurrency will be worth or what it’s for.
The case is again demonstrated with Circles, a blockchain-based universal basic income (UBI) project that launched on October 16 on Ethereum’s xDai sidechain.
Founded by Martin Köppelmann of Gnosis and run by a very small team based in Berlin, Circles promises to offer users 240 of its cryptocurrency CRC each month, but it poses an obstacle to get started: the user has to find three people who already are. inside and get them to form a “trust” line from their Circles portfolio to that of Circles aspirants.
It is a way to create a parallel economy.
For anyone who is decently networked in cryptocurrency, especially within Ethereum, this seems easy enough. The truth is, however, so far Circles has been very slow and buggy.
“We are quite busy,” Blanka Vay from the Circles team told CoinDesk when he was reached by email. “Our servers are down due to huge interest.”
As a post from the official account in the Telegram Circles channel put it on Wednesday:
“We are facing severe infrastructure problems with a naive server configuration and 70 million requests every 24 hours. … We are working hard to improve it so that the app runs more stable.”
Traffic jam
Andrew Gross, of the POA Network, who runs xDai, said the launch of Circles led to one of the largest transaction spikes the network has ever seen.
To be fair, Circles and the cryptic space game Dark Forest are racing head-to-head for driving the biggest transaction spikes on xDai, though Gross noted that sidechain still performs well below capacity. The problem seems to be more with the Circles API.
Circles works from scratch differently than other cryptocurrency projects. His white paper describes how funds move across the network in a social rather than a technological way. Circles is a true social network for the value.
Much like the Lightning Network, value moves through circles via lines of trust. This is important. Circles are intended more to inculcate communities of cooperation, not to transfer billions of dollars around the world, as Bitcoin does.
Circles development team members told CoinDesk that they are working to scale up and move to an infrastructure that can better handle this unexpected growth. This has been frustrating for new users, but you can think of your frustration as akin to the computational energy required to mine fresh bitcoins.
Maybe it’s good that an endless tap of free encryption has some pretty significant friction to get started. Friction only requires patience, not funds, so it is not financially exclusive, even if the initial set of trusted parties represents a privileged class. It’s spreading fast, so every day it should be easier to join, technical issues aside.
Tips for professionals
But for those struggling to get in, I’ve learned a few things about how circles work during the 24-hour period I’ve spent trying to move forward. Hopefully this will help others:
Keep trying. There has been a lot of talk in my Slack channels and with people I know on WhatsApp on the wheels of death. It seems the thorny circles on Circles don’t mean much. Try to participate, give it a minute and then try again. Try again every few hours. Also, removing ad blockers seemed to help.
Reformat the seed phrase when saving. Definitely save your seed sentence, because it allows you to access it via other browsers, but reformat it to be a sentence. When I copied and pasted my words, they pasted as a list. To log back in, you want them in a sentence format, separated by spaces.
Top-up your wallet can help you. In cases where verifications don’t appear or transactions don’t work, restarting wallets can help. Before my account was verified, the only way I could find to do this was to clear the history on my browser. Once your account is verified, though, click on the hamburger menu, go to settings and click on the scary red “Logout” button. Note: Do not click on it if the seed sentence has not been backed up.
Circles are weird about emails. If you receive a spinning wheel in the account creation stage requesting an email, search the screen. He might say he doesn’t like your email. Two of mine were turned down and I just liked my shady email from an obscure German company that I only use to hide from Mark Zuckerberg. He declined my longtime, established Gmail address. I have no idea why.
Find real people who really know you. This might be difficult for some crypto n00bs, but try working on your own network and find people you’ve met for real or make new friends online. Think of this as your little “social mining”. You can only shamelessly begs the randos on Twitter but you’re not building social capital that way. If it takes a little longer to make it real, so be it. Each of us has the personal network that we have earned.
Verifications take forever to register. The rims showed me two checks for hours when I knew I had three (others took even longer). Then, when I walked in, I didn’t get any verifications from anyone who actually told me they would. I received them from people I had asked for and who had not answered directly. I think this is because people thought they had verified my account, but the push didn’t make it. So it went.
Verifying others is no better. So, if you get to the point where you can verify others, just do one person at a time. I got a spinning wheel and then the main screen popped up and a short message popped up saying I had checked them out. I think I’ve checked people several times, but it’s really hard to tell. The first few days of new cryptocurrencies are very exciting.
Return the trust. If someone trusts you, you have to trust them (as long as you do). Right now it doesn’t show users’ names half the time, so this can be boring, but once it gets easier look at all the people who have trusted you, click on their profiles and return the favor. It’s like Twitter: double opt-in for a real connection.
Only use one car at first. I bounced between two laptops and my cell phone. Circles doesn’t seem to like it, and that makes sense with the system under load. So choose where you want to start and stay true until the circles fail to grow.
If anyone manages to send CRC, please let me know. For my first two days I was unable to give away any of my funds, not even among people of mutual trust. Whether CRC proves to be useful in the real world depends on everyone who can open the taps.
Hopefully, these tips should help those determined folks get in faster. Don’t expect a small Web 3 project to run at Web 2 speed.
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