Bitcoin Forum

this is the future of crypto messaging:

http://twister.net.co/

better than bitmessage. inspired by bitcoin. uses bittorrent with a blockchain. made by former xine dev. uses libtorrent (libbitcoin was inspired by libtorrent).

this is it.

more info:

https://wiki.unsystem.net/index.php/Twister
Freenode IRC #twister
whitepaper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152

if they go by the layout they show they are soooooo gonna get sued by twitter. also with the name.

So, to summarize, it is a knock-off of twitter which is decentralized and cryptographically secure.

I think the mining reward of a promoted message is an interesting idea ... how long will it be until people start pools to mine blocks, sell the space for advertising and pay out rewards to miners in bitcoins?

lol, first thing I thought.

Nice idea but like other people have said its a shame it looks/sounds so much like twitter.

i think this is incredible

minus the similar name to twitter and layout as someone already mentioned.

the concept is great and potential to go mainstream is big but getting sued/owned by twitter is risky

Intriguing concept, mining for adspace revenue. It may very well only be a matter of time before this is a reality.

I guess that depends on whether people start using Twister. If people are using it, then advertisers will want to get the promoted messages and will start mining pools (or pay other people to make mining pools). If nobody is using Twister, then nobody will care about the promoted messages and nobody will make pools.

Is there a way to bridge between Twitter and Twister? What I mean is, if I make an account on Twister, would it be possible to follow people who post on Twitter?

Why are messages limited to only 140 characters? Does this limitation also apply to direct messages?

there's a lot more possible with this:
https://wiki.unsystem.net/index.php/Twister/Ideas

it could enable many of the difficult to use crypto features of bitcoin like managing a multisig, negotiating some of the contracts, requesting a key to generate new receiver addresses (for privacy). there are many possibilities. it could even obsolete and replace the payment protocol.

if this happens unsystem will invest resources to continue developing it under the same name keeping the same layout.

Yes, you can bridge using gateways between 2 usernames. You can make this gateway easily using a Python script:
http://twister.net.co/?page_id=120

It's limited to 140 chars because that's optimal but AFAIK I don't think it's a fixed limit in the protocol.

Twister looks freaking badass

Because Twitter is lol

Is there anyway to invest into twister?

I think that model is outdated anyway. Didn't they only limit it to 140 characters because that's what a text message was?

my twister ids: @genjix @darkwallet

Nice. This looks promising.

Potential PR coup: It would be interesting to automate the gateway in a UI click friendly way. Make it 2-way, then if/when Twitter cancels the accounts of the Twitter-side gateway, the Twister side can still operate (albeit with functional Twitter accounts).

Then, Twitter look like censors, and Twister look all heroic and stuff.

Change the name though. Seriously. Look how unpractical it is to discuss them along side each other, the similarity is actually not a good idea.

cool idea, but seems to just inherit the problems of DHTs.

what he's done is use a block chain to manage the registration process and the *claim to an identity*.  Surprisingly, he does not reference Namecoin.  Not sure if he's done better than Diaspora.

Whitepaper is fairly well written.  Nice work, good contribution, but not sure if this is going to change much for most people.

for instance, how does this compare to RetroShare?

this is more elegant than retroshare. retroshare is lets put everything here. twister is next generation.

maybe you can specify some of these problems? i've been emailing the author, and he's a very competent coder.

Trademark infringement suit in 3... 2... 1...

I'm not here to do bug regressions for this person.

the concept just sort of glues together DHTs and Bitcoin-like Blockchains.  DHTs have a number of problems associated with them.  Also if he wants to use the Blockchain, there must be some clear incentive for the 'mining' function, in this case there is none(he does note this on his website).

Cool idea, but likely to break or be compromised if ever used in any significant capacity.  No one has explored attack vectors yet.

and btw- if this person wants recognition in this area, it might be a good idea to reference where there is precedent, in particular NameCoin.

-bm

Worth keeping an eye on, anyway.

you haven't really said anything of substance yet that i can try to address. i think dht scales much better than bitmessage.

and hand waving it away as just dht + blockchain is like handwaving away bitcoin as proof of work + signed timestamped messages. he's put a lot of thought into different use cases and built the primitives to support them (restype="single" or "multi"). and thought about scalability. i have confidence in this unless someone can tell me real problems.

In the founder's defense, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisted_curves

Twitter doesn't have a trademark on the letters "T-W-I". 'Twister' with a picture of a tornado is its own concept, and very distinct from the bird 'tweets' that the 'Twitter' brand is based on. The layout otoh..

Interesting concept. Do you have a twitter account where I could keep up to date about it?

Haha. If they do they probably wont have it for long  :D.

Natively secure p2p messaging with low overheads ... this has much promise.

e.g. I can envisage a distributed exchange using elements of this ...

Hmm...

I'm not sure about the promoted messages.  If twister ends up being as decentralised as Bitcoin then there would be nothing to stop someone taking the code, snipping out the promoted messages, and providing an ad-block experience.  Mining incentive might well reduce to donations (maybe that's enough).  I'd prefer to see a more robust incentive mechanism, particularly given that a successful service will require more data storage than Bitcoin.

Also, I can see that the messages will be secure but don't see resistance to meta-data tracking (please correct me if this is addressed).

I very much agree with these statements. This can not possibly scale even up to smallish numbers. Actually its the same reason exchanges can not be distributed. The blockchain can't be used for time-ordered messaging. Transactions in the chain are not ordered. The order of transactions in one block does not matter. However, order of messages in communication does matter. If in a thread one post comes later than another but refers to ts hat post, order is not preserved. So a conversation (i.e. message B is a reply to message A) is not possible, because order is needed.

I think there is generally not a good understanding of what can be done with the blockchain in principle. The most interesting application by far is namecoin. The reason is that the cycle of messages is much longer. You reserve a name and this stays constant for say 12 months. I find it also interesting in that a domain name really is a link to a server, operated by a person or organization. If you think about it a corporation is really not much else. Twitter is a set of people tied to the services of Twitter Inc, a completely fictitious entity. There is no reason we could have much better legal frameworks. For example most multi-nationals avoid taxes completely with various schemes, corrupt governments, hand over information to power groups etc.etc.

Didn't namecoin "blow up" for some reason? There was some bad news last month about it, just can't remember exactly what it was.

you're right. There was a serious bug, in the beginning the current maintainer thought it was unfixable. Eventually he and the community found a solution and fixed the problem. At the moment on the exchange platform that I commonly use 1 NMC values is 7.71$.
 

Exchanges can be, and will be, distributed.  Have a look at the whitepaper: http://www.altchain.org/?q=whitepapers/paper2.html

The algorithm is not the same as bitcoin.  It uses Confidence Chains.

also a more in depth discussion of these topics on Wilmott.org: http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=10&threadid=95845&FTVAR_MSGDBTABLE=&STARTPAGE=4

OK, thanks for filling me in. Good to see namecoin is alive and kicking :)

This is an amazing idea and guess what, the biggest brand names like Pepsi, Google, Bitcoin and several dozen more are already taken :p

The compiling is a bit tricky but the idea is awesome. This is how all websites could be constructed in the future.

What do you mean by "compiling"?

http://twister.net.co/?page_id=23

Nope. It was deliberately limited to force you to keep your messages short and to the point.  Microblogging.

Twister looks great.

Ah yes, I see now ;)

I'll wait for a nice OSX .dmg file :)

Texts are 160 each, so the 20 is for @reallylongusernames

twister in perfect, i like it)

So did you run it ?:)

any precompiled versions out yet?

yep, my login in twister is shift

no, you can compile it, i do it on mac it not hard to do it

Tnx for precompiled win32 version... works great!

BTW: is this PoW for names really needed? Are ppl really squatting names like crazy?

This is awesome! Previously I compiled under linux and project is really nice. Let spread the news about bin version to others!

I read about Twister.  It really picqued my interest.

I must say,  from bitmessage, to twister...

I'm really excited for the innovations that bitcoin technology is bringing to the fold.

I can't wait for someone to develop a bitcoin based browser because that would really be awesome! 

I actually was thinking about different ways that a bitcoin based browser might function...

I think that it would solve many issues with current browsers. (Privacy/security wise)

If you are on Linux and have docker installed, you can use this image for a one-line quickstart: https://index.docker.io/u/mazzolino/twister/ (https://index.docker.io/u/mazzolino/twister/)

Unofficial packages by iShift:
https://github.com/iShift/twister-webkit/releases

0.9.26.0 too old, but works fine on Yosemite