Bitcoin Forum

I have been looking on here every once in a while for a few weeks, and only see clients that are under development. Are there any that are finished and working and being used?

I heard of one (bitcoinj I think), but I read that it was very unstable and not reliable.

I just want to know if there's an alternative client that I can use right now.

Mt Gox is available on Android Market. It was released today. Check it out.

Sorry, I don't have Android. I'm looking for a client for PC...

My client is sort of finished (or at least, usable and haven't heard complaints about stability)...

that is not a "client" its is a gui. please don't label it that way.

check out www.walletbit.com

(it's an online-wallet but still)

I have it on good authority that flexcoin is dropping invite only in the next 24 hours or so :)

It does embed the core client code though, with some changes, so even though it derived from Satoshi's it technically is a client. Not that I care about how it is labeled.

There's only one codebase that fully implements the Bitcoin protocol, and that's the Satoshi client. All others are incomplete, or frontends to the Satoshi client.

BitCoinJ and BitCoinJS are the most complete alternatives as far as I know. It's true that currently BitCoinJ is quite unstable and has some bugs. These rough edges will be smoothed with time.

What is BitcoinJS? Is it something more stable? Or is there nothing stable enough to trust right now?

As far as I know, the only codebases that have any real usage with actual end users are Satoshis code and BitCoinJ. The bugs that are being reported in BitCoinJ come from a crash reporter in the Android Wallet app.

So if you want a complete, stable implementation, there is only one, the original implementation.

What features do you expect from an alternative client? It might be easier to find people sharing the same needs and creating a fork of the original client, rather than to create a complete new codebase.

I want a client that (these are all things I don't like about the current client):
-Opens in less than 5 seconds
-Says "Are you sure you want to send the payment to XXXXXXXX?" after you click SEND
-Has a column for "balance" so I can look back and see the balance I had when I made a transaction
-I don't have to wait up to 10 minutes for my payment to be broadcast just after I open the program
-I can use multiple wallets in one instance of the program

There are a few more, but I can't remember them right now. My main problem is the fourth one on the list. Every time after I open Bitcoin (which itself takes over half a minute), then it takes another half minute to become usable (not frozen), I send a payment, and it doesn't broadcast for about 5 to 10 minutes.
If this is just my client, could anybody tell me what to do to fix it?

Thanks

When you say "broadcast", do you mean the transaction going from 0 to 1 confirmations or nothing shows up until 5~10 minutes later?

When you double-click on a transaction, it comes up with some info. Normally, almost immediately after a sent transaction, it says, "0/unconfirmed, broadcast through _ nodes". But the ones that I'm talking about say something like, "Has not been successfully broadcast yet". And that's how I know it wasn't sent.

That's something I've never seen so I can't help with that, sorry. I've always gotten the almost immediately 0/unconfirmed.

Although it would seem to imply that it's not a problem with the client but with your settings/network?

He is probably talking about 0/offline.  If your blockchain is out of date, you can't send transactions to the network.  The client makes you wait until your copy of the blockchain is caught up.

Does that mean when all the blocks are downloaded? Many times I have all the blocks downloaded before it "broadcasts" the payment, which takes a long time sometimes. I look at the block count on BlockExp, and I have all of them, but it still delays

You'll have to define what you mean by broadcast, then.  A transaction (assuming it isn't a spam transaction) is transmitted to all other nodes through the p2p network almost instantly by the standard client.  However, it won't get a confirmation and it won't show up in blockexplorer until it is included in a block by a miner.  That delay has nothing to do with the client (i.e. no other client can possibly make that go faster).  That is just how bitcoin works.  You can ensure that your transaction gets included in a block as fast as possible by including an appropriate transaction fee.  Zero fee transactions take longer.

You can also see unconfirmed transactions almost immediatly (those that have been transmitted but not yet included in a block) at http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/.   Search for either the destination address or for the amount you sent (assuming it was a fairly unique amount and not 1.0).