Bitcoin Forum

I'm new here, but expect no quarter from the flames.  I enjoy mining the vast number of various altcoins that have been released as of late, but with a few slight exceptions, we really aren't seeing anything new brought to the table.  I would love to contribute something altcoin related, but I refuse to tweak a few settings and release a garbage coin in hopes of pump and dump riches.  Instead, with this past week's YaCoin FUD debacle, why not reimplement the whole system for a new coin.  Create a generalized client codebase in a language such as Java or C# (anything managed, really) such that decompiling the "precompiled binaries" would be easy enough for anyone to do a safety audit.

I'd be extremely interested in creating this codebase, and even including support for different hash algorithms within the client so per "coin" fork selecting either SHA256, scrypt(1024,1,1), scrypt(n,1,1) would be simple.  In fact, we could extend this to other hashing algorithms as well.  This would give coin-makers incentive to innovate and make a real change within their coin, and it would allow for miners with low-end equipment (CPU-only) to have a fair shot in certain cases.

As I said, I have no plans to actually implement this yet, it is only a suggestion.  A rewrite may help ease the hyper-expansion of all the various coins popping up every day, and may give us something beneficial in a cryptocurrency in the end.

Thoughts?

There are java libraries to do some of the fundamental internals so maybe find a java based bitcoin, or make one, and work from that?

-MarkM-

Thanks for the feedback.  I really wouldn't have the time to do something like this right now, and if I did I would spend quite a bit of time working on it (likely with many other contributers) before launch.  My primary interest would be in ease-of-access to the code, even in the precompiled versions to help prevent people having their wallet.dat stolen, system trojaned, etc.  Also keeping the number of required external libraries to a minimum to make it "easier to compile" for those who are having trouble compiling their own copies of the coins that are popping up everywhere now.

Well with java there are things like Eclipse and Netbeans that go and get all the depenedencies (well actually heck don't need the GUI for that, as actually they use maven for that part) and so on, so pretty much anyone should be able to build java apps.

-MarkM-

If I had all the time in the world I would love to try to implement a fresh cryptocoin from scratch, starting with the Satoshi whitepaper as a basis.  One fairly easy new feature I'd like to include would be to use an arbitrary precision decimal class so that currency units could be infinitely divisible from day one.

Great idea. More forks in here than in the back room of a hipster NYC Hibachi restaurant.   I'm looking to almost do a complete rewrite for ScienceCoin - hopefully in python  :o It looks like this might be a good starting point, though not really.   https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=205215.0