Well, yes and no. The idea behind Sickle was to create an economic model simulator. A simulator capable of measuring the effect on wealth distribution caused by changes to the monetary policy, e.g. fluctuations on the interest rate and introduction of transaction fees.
For that purpose a new distributed cryptocurrency was created, the SickleCoin. And this coin operates on top of its own bespoke blockchain implementation, the SickleChain.
Sickle is a node.js app with a command line interface. A React webapp to manage and monitor Sickle experiments is current under development. When a new experiment is launched, multiple autonomous agents are spawned - including both comrades and commissars, see the Glossary below - and then a high volume of monetary transactions is initiated.
Make sure you have node.js installed in your local machine. Then check out the project. From the project root folder enter the following command,
npm run start
This will get the Sickle app running. It will only take a few seconds to have it bootstrapped. Once running, you have a handful of commands you can use:
> setup - Creates a new experiment and starts it. Currently locked to 10 comrades and 1 commissar.
> print - Prints the wallet balance of all comrade agents (if an experiment is set).
> list - Prints an extract of the blockchain.
> stop - Stops any ongoing experiment.
> exit - Exits the Sickle app.
Comrade - A user node in the system. Comrades iniate transactions and own a Sickle wallet.
Commissar - A mining/minting node. Registers transactions and attemtps to seal blocks by mining hashes.
Politburo - Orchestrator and monitoring node. Sets up new experiments, starts and stops them, and observes their executions.