Bitcoin Forum

This is the first time we have a completely independent and full Bitcoin software stack.

Before we had clients like Electrum using bitcoind as a backend, or MultiBit which do full block validation (they assume a transaction is trusted once it gets deep in the blockchain).

https://i.imgur.com/YUzk1cM.png

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=291576

It doesn't look much yet. Still terminal based, but adding the GUI is easy. And it's an experimental prototype.

It's the pre-alpha proof of concept.

To protect the integrity of the network with no single point of failure, it's vital to diversify the software development process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Microsoft_antitrust_case

A standard controlled & set by a single party is disastrous for a neutral Bitcoin.

Please don't do any more media appearances - this kind of work is better. - we appreciate this kind of work. Thank you Amir.

Amir, I have paid for two tickets to Unsystem conference in Vienna and received 0 feedback from you on what's happening about it. It would have been nice to receive a personal response from you, or all your work will be marked as highly suspicious in my eyes. Refund, for one thing, is welcome.

This is the only email I have from you:


My email: amir@unsystem.net


I am a squatter and anarchist. I'm not your yuppie making toy apps. I build tools for the people. If I don't conform to your vision of how Bitcoin should look like, then that's your problem.

You rock Amir, both your coding work as well as your media appearances. Thank you and keep up the good work.


To VinceSamios. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/502769/DealWithIt.gif)

Legittttt

Man I really need to learn how to code so I can contribute something to Bitcoin rather than leeching.

Soon.

I hope to get more info about this in Barcelona!

Keep up the good work man!!! This is great!

Quick questions: What sort of minimum system resources does this require?

The King and the Fireman (http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/The_King_and_the_Fireman) much?

Contribute to Bitcoin doing what you do best. If your calling in life was to be a software developer you would have been one already.

IFL

Great to see more wallets out there!

Curious:  What is an independent and full software stack?

bitcoinj is 100% independent of bitcoind codebase, and has been deployed in the field through multibit and Bitcoin Wallet for a while.

I thought bitcoinj depends on full nodes, does it not?

It does. It won't act as a full peer, and most of the blockchain strategies don't store the full blockchain anyway. It does do transaction verification and it relies on full peers for it's own blockchain download.

Amir,

Is this a full client node?

Are regular (non-"deterministic") wallets supported?

Check this out http://bitcoinmagazine.com/what-libbitcoin-and-sx-are-and-why-they-matter/

Also

I like the fact that you used the AGPL license. This will make it illegal for people to run their custom builds of the software without publishing the changes.
Are you going to build your own Bitcoin Foundation around this software? Or are you aiming to have it supported like the Bitcoin-QT client?

Can this client build Block templates and accept/propagate block solutions on the network? Does it have a name yet? (I thought sx was the name of your toolset?)

Very cool.

Though I'll repeat what I've told alternative implementers,

_Please_ do not mine on this until it at least passes the block tester. Inconsistencies in block validation can result in devastating forks which would be harmful to all Bitcoin users and not just the users of the inconsistent software. This is more of a risk today than it ever was since a majority of mining is just in three hands and so many people use SPV wallets.

I agree.

However, I'll note this highlights what I've said before about economic dependence solely on Bitcoin being risky. The last sentence above doesn't currently pertain to Litecoin, for example.

I think it is great to have another client development line. Thanks Amir!!

Thanks for email address, I've sent you a message.

Offtopic: what do you mean by saying you are a "squatter"? Just for my education.

cool so when are you going to give the coins back to the people you stole from either intentionally or through criminal negligence?

+1  

Bitcoin is a worldwide community base from businessmen to anarchists, rich to poor and someday maybe even females will start to use it.  :)

This sounds just as much like a condemnation of the way the network has diversified as it does a plea to maintain stability for the common good. Has anyone ever come up with a good design for a non-sequential blockchain, i.e. the validity of one block does not depend upon network consensus? Sounds like a totally different logic to the Satoshi model, but I wonder whether so much reliance on the core dev client doesn't go against the decentralised ethos? "The Bitcoin model is that it has no central authority, apart from all the exceptions to this principle, of course"

Nice! And much needed!
Down with all central points of failure!

Ente

^ this. While I appreciate the work Amir is doing for the community, he left a lot of Bitcoiners hanging with Bitcoinica. Don't turn your back on us Amir.

Cool stuff.  If fewer people, businesses, and systems rely on the same systems, bitcoin becomes stronger.

Isn't there actually an Enterprise level bitcoin implementation independently written as well? I forget the name, but it's written by a hungarian guy.

Bits of proof?

It's just a personal preference; requires some training though

http://indonesialogy.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/squat-toilet.jpg

Yez! Thats written from the ground up I believe, no?

That's great news!  Regarding other implementations:  I think there's btcd in Go, is this what you guys mean?  I'm not sure about its status, but believe it is also going to be finished some time soon according to the initial comments.  I'm definitely looking forward to having multiple compatible but otherwise independent implementations!

In the UK a squatter is a person who legally gains access to an abandoned building and starts living there. If the owner doesn't come forward to ask them to leave within a certain number of years the building eventually becomes the squatters property.

Up until last year it was a long and expensive process to evict a squatter in London but new rules have made it easier for a landlord to evict squatters from a residential home. It's still difficult to evict squatters from commercial buildings. In the case of commercial buildings police tactics are to raid the building because they believe there is a wanted person inside, then when they have everyone outside the landlord changes the locks.

London has an acute housing shortage. Planning regulations are extremely strict and the process of apply for permission to build a house can costs thousands of pounds. If you buy a field in the middle of nowhere and try to build a house it's very unlikely that the local council will allow you. There is no shortage of empty land around London. The regulations are in place solely to keep property prices high.

Successive governments have been stuffed full of property millionaires who only care about increasing the size of their portfolios. Banks have also played their part by allowing mortgage lending on large income multiples.

Building new homes and making accommodation cheaper is the antithesis of the landlord class politicians and the greedy baby boomers who vote for them. Anyone under the age of 35 who doesn't have rich parents is being screwed. Squatting is a perfectly reasonable way to say FUCK OFF to the politicians and banks. 

Just to show how fucking crazy London property is look at this shed for sale in north London. The asking price is £250,000!!!!

http://media.rightmove.co.uk/67k/66943/36976334/66943_387836A_IMG_05_0002_max_620x414.JPG

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/commercial-property-for-sale/property-36976334.html (http://www.rightmove.co.uk/commercial-property-for-sale/property-36976334.html)

Now look at the people who object to building homes. The green belt is the mythical area around cities which consists of empty fields. According to baby boomers saving these fields is more important than giving young people the chance to own a cheap home and start a family. These baby boomers are pure evil  >:(

I bet they all have defined benefit pensions too  >:( >:(

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/files/2012/09/greenbelt_1523234c.jpg

Please stop this nonsense. I have given my heart and soul to Bitcoin for 3 years, opensource for 10+ years and profited nothing. I have 4 BTC and no other money. I have received no money from any of these rich & popular Bitcoin people. I am supported by good people who have not much themselves and don't really understand Bitcoin, but believe in me and what I value.

But I love Bitcoin, and am here forever. I promised myself this in summer 2010, and nothing has changed.

meanig gives a good explanation. The situation is deep, and the land is ours. It's been stolen by rulers and corruption. And then people work for a corrupt system that abuses, controls and limits them paying rent every month for a small box. But OK, if they want us to play this stupid economic game, we will just build our own markets, out-compete them and buy back the planet.

Empty property is everywhere in London. We occupied empty houses of the queen in January, and the police response was massive but we did a 9 hour resistance on the roof. The police would never react that way if your private property is occupied. The big response is for her majesty.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2257490/Riot-police-evict-squatters-exclusive-central-London-house-hold-rooftop-protest.html

In the G8, they sent 1000 police to arrest everybody protesting. I find it ironic that the G8 magazine had an article called "Protecting Digital Economies" talking about Bitcoin with such golden quotes like:

"alternative payment mechanisms, such
as Bitcoin and a host of others, can enable
criminal and terrorist groups to launder
money and fund their operations."

"Governments of the world have the ability
right now to ban these payment mechanisms."

"If treasuries and financial institutions
around the world were to block those
transactions and permit only legitimate
currencies to be used on the internet through
regulated payment service providers and
cards (such as Visa, MasterCard and American
Express), then the flow of many billions of
dollars to criminal groups would be stemmed."

"bring about a more safe and secure
internet environment for all citizens.
If the leaders of the European Union and
United States could be convinced to take a
lead on these initiatives, that would be a huge
contribution to making the internet a safe
place for financial transactions. At the same
time, it would also strike a blow against those
who would try to destroy the fabric of our the
world’s well-being."

I love the last sentence. Quick, the sleepwalking zombies are waking up!

libbitcoin is the first full reimplementation of the Bitcoin standard. It was started May 2011 by me and Patrick Strateman.

BitsOfProof and btcd are new entries into the space in the last few months, but there was nothing before.

This wallet is the first wallet (software you can use to do Bitcoin stuff, manages your keys in a wallet, creates transactions and has an interface) based off a full reimplementation. Other wallets either depended on bitcoind or were partial nodes.

much needed :D

It's always appreciated to see an alternative and independent implementation. Thanks for your continuing efforts. I appreciate and sympathize with your values.

Amir,

Well done! The more implementations we get the better able we are to see bugs (like the 0.8 issue).


We need a robust plan for analyzing this; was one of the Bitcoin Foundation grants given to address this?

This is a wallet. libbitcoin is the client and can do any Bitcoin thing you want really because it has a powerful API: http://libbitcoin.dyne.org

Ah, so it's a reimplementation with different separation of the network uses to how the Bitcoin Foundation backed team are doing it. Very much the sort of protocol complete software that should be produced.

I will at some stage try to get this working with my p2pool setup, has that been tested yet? Presumably p2pool needs to receive broadcasted information about the current block (to the specified port...) and the rest takes care of itself? I am hesitant to try it, as there is no small chance I may find a block (particularly as I've been unlucky with regards to block finding up till now, it'd be sensible to expect at least one before we move up another magnitude of difficulty). Don't want to go down in history as the blockchain forking devil miner  :D

This looks good, though I can't wait for picocoin

Just a minor correction - bitcoinj has had a fully verifying mode for many months now. It was written by Matt Corallo. MultiBit doesn't use it out of the box because like all fully verifying implementations it's very slow, but you could make a MultiBit with bitcoind level verification just by tweaking one or two lines of code.

So whilst it's great to see libbitcoin develop like this, what Amir is saying is not correct about it being the first or only such reimplementation. Indeed, the block tester that Gregory mentions was written by Matt in order to verify the bitcoinj full mode worked properly.

This thread has lots of information about full node implementations. I recently asked about the status of such software at http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/12821 (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/12821) with no answers so far.

I intend to maintain my question and keep the status of each implementation updated based on answers I get.

You know that's not true. libbitcoin was a full implementation since 2011. You were also claiming in another topic that I'm not a Bitcoin developer.