As I understood it the Hash algorithms that are used are completely replacable, and should the demise of SHA-256 become apparent we could switch to another Hashing algorithm, starting a new chain, and users would buy that new currency with their old coins, creating an inflation of the old coins and creating request for the new version, just like creating new services that rely on BC does now.

I don't think moving to a new version would be hard 

I strongly believe that a system like BitCoin is only destined to survive for a long time if the protocol is standardized and split from the Mainline client development.

A minimalistic, but clean, Python implementation of the client could be used as a reference for future clients that could then be custom tailored to the needs of its users.

Well that's a bit extreme, don't you think? Only changes to the basic functionality of generating proof of work and subsequently hashing transactions with them cannot be touched, the protocol itself can be designed to be quite extensible, just as BitTorrent, where the clients might provide additional features if supported.

I'd really like to see some alternative clients that could then be customized with all sorts of features and run as a normal daemon just like mail and web :-)

I was wondering whether someone here might be interested in creating an alternative client to the Project, which would not only make it easier for some people to get going with BitCoin but also would make it easier to write customized clients and take the load off the main development team.

For this to work we'd have to know exactly how the protocol is designed. I could reverse engineer it but I probably won't be able to explain everything

BTW: Python is not my first choice when it comes to programming languages but for this I think it'd be the most flexible.

Edit: just thought of it: Google App Engine supports Python so there's another application area

Hi all,

I'm currently trying to get the openSuse Build Service to build bitcoin binaries for all the major distros, but wxWidgets is giving me a headache, as the development branch 2.9.0 is in not a single repository, and I'm having huge problems building it myself.

So I was wondering whether it is possible at all to compile everything without any depencies on wxWidgets?

Once wxWidgets 2.9.0 starts appearing in the default repos I'll create packages for the GUI version too, but a CLI version is better than nothing for the moment.

Regards,
Chris

P.S.: If you're interested at peeking, please take a look here: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=home%3Acdecker%3Abitcoin

Anyone into a set of multi entity owned DNS servers that cooperate for a Fast Flux [1] network to ensure bootstrap availability?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_flux

I'm currently trying to get BitCoin to compile on the openSuse Build Service, which would allow us to create a wide range of precompiled packages for a variety of distros but I'm continually running into problems. The most important of them is the wxWidgets 2.9.0 requirement which is incredibly hard to provide, and the source of many of the problems described on the Forum. Why is it so important to have a 2.9.0? Looking through the source of 2.8.10 it appears that unicode is possible with that version too.

Regards,
cdecker

How about an SVG version? That way we could automatically generate smaller and larger versions as needed, and storage in the Source Control Management is an option too.

The headless mode is incredibly usefull. Finally I can start generating on my servers in the night