Wow, I didn't realize Bruce had started talking about AH here already. I was planning to wait until there was a full spec proposal and a cool demo, then become an active forum member.
Sorry you had to first hear of my account-hub ideas through Bruce's enthusiastic but semi-technical and semi-correct wording.
So howdy, everyone. This is my first of many forum posts. I was planning to lone-wolf it until a prototype later this week, but I'm looking forward to future collaboration!
Basically, AH provides an ordinary (mybitcoin.com)-like account server with a full API and a mobile client using that API, plus
(1) There's a high-speed side network for broadcasting invoices among the AHs
(2) If you're an AH ("X") making an ordinary bitcoin transfer to another AH ("Y"), you can immediately increase Y's estimate of the probability that the transaction won't fail due to a multi-spend attempt by making an API call to Y and signing (that transfer data + your public key) with your private key and the private key used for the transfer.
That's about it so far.
I'm pretty busy today, but I'll write more this week.
Meanwhile, I pushed more documentaion this morning:
https://github.com/tafa/account-hubWhy not re-use the bitcoin-central source code
(1) I hate the AGPL. AH will be under a permissive license.
(2) Competition is a good thing
(3) I wanted to focus specifically on the APIs and protocols at first
(4) (NodeJS + CoffeeScript) is awesome
I ask because I'm also working on an Android app.
A app that communicates with the Bitcoin network, or an app that just acts as a client for account servers?
I'm only doing the latter.
Everything he does, he has committed
Not true. In the public repos, I've only committed documentation so far.
There's implementation work that hasn't been added to those repos. Within a few days, that won't be the case.
...Ripple...
That could be really cool. The current AH services do not involve debt, but AHs could provide debt-related services as well...
I'll read up on all the details of Ripple soon.