Twitter alerts for general fund donations - KnowledgeMurky9635 - Completed

layout: fr
title: Twitter alerts for General Fund donations
author: KnowledgeMurky9635
date: July 27, 2021
amount: 0
milestones:
  - name: Scrape BinaryFates gitlab activity
    funds: 100% (0 XMR)
    done: July 27, 2021
    status: finished
  - name: Get last hour of Matrix chat from Monero community channel
    funds: 100% (0 XMR)
    done: July 27, 2021
    status: finished
payouts:
  - date:
    amount:
  - date:
    amount:

3 problems i've noticed:

1. The viewkey for the Monero general fund is public, however, there are several steps involved with creating a view-only wallet and you can't just link someone to look at it (especially someone not involved with Monero).
2. People who do create a view-only wallet will be confused by false inputs which are actually 'change' outputs from an outgoing transaction (which are disclosed on Moneros gitlab repository by @binaryFate.
3. There was some unrest over 2020-2021 transparency report being 'late'. (people being unaware the wallet is public)

My proposed solutions:

1. Tweet every donation that is received so people can simply visit the twitter account and scroll through its activity.
2. Donation tweets will be delayed for 1 hour. This will give @binaryFate enough time to disclose any outgoing transactions on gitlab. If the input is found to be a change output - instead of tweeting the amount - binaryFates comment will be tweeted instead e.g. "Donating ?xmr to (some proposal) : (proposal link)."
3. Because updates will be posted live, there will be less / no unrest for the yearly transparency report and it's a more convenient way of viewing the general fund wallet.

How i've solved this:

• use tx-notify from monero-wallet-rpc to run a python script when incoming transactions are received. (thanks melo.tools)
• check if the tx id was posted by BinaryFate (on gitlab or in the Matrix Monero room.
• send the tweet.
• https://github.com/plowsof/monero-fund-watch
• https://twitter.com/WatchFund/

Problems:

Contributions to ccs proposals are not the only outgoing transactions from the general fund (which cause the false change inputs) so for this script to validate all inputs - these payments need to be disclosed also e.g. "Withdrawing ?xmr from the general fund to purchase server bandwidth." - this is now solved assuming none ccs related payments are posted in the Monero Matrix room.

The webscraping method is a 'hack'. Outgoing transactions should ideally be disclosed in a simple text file somewhere that a script can easily parse, but it works, and is convenient for binaryFate.

Improvements:

If/when all outgoing transactions are disclosed, then an 'unofficial' monthly transparency report can be tweeted automatically e.g. ' ?xmr in, ?xmr out ' and to see what it was spent on you just have to scroll through the twitter feed.

The original version of this script had a fixed rate of 1 transaction per website scrape.. a fixed block size if you will. This isn't Monero like at all, so i improved upon this by collecting transactions over a 20 minute window (dynamic blocksize?) so now there is only 1 website/matrix chat scrape every 20 minutes maximum for n transactions.