Inspiration

We were inspired to do this project for Hack Dearborn 2024 category "Fintech" and topic "Financial Literacy" because of the many misconceptions about cryptocurrency.

Many people believe that cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology of blockchain to be either for technical-users only, a huge financial risk, or even an outright scam. With Socraticoin, named after the greek philosopher and teacher Socrates, we seek to provide an implementation of crypto that can be demonstrated in classrooms for educational purposes, via a simple to use web interface.

What we learned

We learned many lessons about teamwork and collaboration. Our members consist of first-time hackers, and this is even the first time we have used tools like git in any real capacity. As for the content of the project, we gained greater understanding and respect for blockchain technology and it's ingenious simplicity.

Project

Our project was written in Python, as it's the language most of us were already familiar with. The web interface was written in React, for the same reason.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges was properly utilizing the cryptography library we chose. Being a large and popular libary, the layers of abstraction were confusing at first and required carefuly study of the documentation before being able to correctly integrate the functions we needed to move forward with the project.