I don't like Gavin's and Jeff's Bitcoin client - can I write my own?

[TierNolan]

A C++ regression suite would be really, really useful to have. Though it's quite hard to do effectively because the protocol is so minimal - it's not possible, for example, to find out if a node accepted your block or tx except by doing some rather indirect tricks or using JSON-RPC which makes it only work for the C++ impl.

Maybe you could see if the other node broadcasts your transaction.

The test suite could be

- have the client under test connect to 2 other (known good) nodes
- send 1000 transactions to the node under test
- see which transactions it forwards and which it refuses to forward

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[Kais]

Oh, and speaking of trust... unless you have a recognized Brand Name, I don't think you'll have any success with a closed-source client.

Yes, DEFinitely won't get much support or use if it's closed source and people don't trust you. Open source is the best

[ghotir]

So I woke up one morning and decided I don't like Gavin's and Jeff's bitcoin clients for any of the platforms.

Can I write my own, and is there anything technically stopping me from doing this if I were to follow the rules of trading/transactions on the Bitcoin network?

Maybe I want to write a Haskell or a Clojure client... or Ruby. Is there anything stopping me from writing one and getting other people to use it if they see value in it?

Where is the protocol specified of how to write a Bitcoin client/daemon?

Thanks!

Go for it.
I'm teaching myself Python, and am writing my own python-[n]curses frontend to bitcoind - nothing special, just sending the arguments to bitcoind.
I taught myself PHP-MySQL years back in a similar fashion by writing my own blogging scripts.