Is the Bitcoin client ever going to be usable?

[IIOII]

From my point of view performance and reduction of required resources should be a top priority.

Wouldn't a loading screen slowdown the startup? In addition it would feel like starting an application suite, not a tool for making a quick transaction.

Just my BTC 0.02

[etotheipi]

As someone who decided to jump into client development, myself, please hear my 0.02 BTC as well:

Building a BTC client is f***ing hard.  This is many months' worth of effort, even for very experienced programmers with knowledge of all the cryptography, networking, protocols, etc.   Additionally, there really isn't an easy "public beta" phase, because the last thing you want is for someone to use your client and lose 100 BTC because your wallet-encryption algorithm got dorked up by some boundary case that only happens once in a million times.  That event gets broadcast through forums/BTCnews and no one is willing to try your client again for fear they might lose their coins.  I tell you, there's nothing more satisfying than spending months developing a client that no one wants to use...   (this didn't happen to me, I'm just giving a glimpse of what could go wrong).

The fact that 0.3.24 client is "beta" really means "freakin-awesome-but-a-little-short-on-features."  I agree, the community needs more-and-or-better clients, more usability, less tech-savy-ness-required, etc.  But to be fair, BTC is extremely complicated under the hood and extremely sensitive to functional- and security-related bugs.  With my experience, I'm not surprised it's taking so long. 

Additionally, I'm sure you noticed what happened each time there has been a BTC disaster:  MtGox getting hacked, and MyBitcoin stealing/losing everyone's money.  These events had nothing to do with the Bitcoin itself being weak, yet the price dropped pretty substantially on both events due to lack of confidence.  Imagine now if there was a plethora of buggy clients out there, people losing coins, losing wallets, encryption not actually working, security holes in the networking, etc.  That actually would look like BTC itself is crappy.   At least the current client is literally usable.  It doesn't lose your coins, or open up your network to attacks.  I'd rather it be slow than insecure.

I hear your pain.  But be patient... there's no other way...

[markm]

Don't think the testnet is going to solve that for you either.

The first new blockchains I built I built by only modifying the -testnet sections of the client.

Guess what? Those blockchains don't work if you try to run them using the main sections of the code.

Oh and worse than that, not only did the blockchains not work but also all the "accounts" in the wallets now have zero balances, except the "" account which hopefully might have "inherited" the coins that vanished from the other accounts.

So don't test using -testnet, test using your own whole new non-test net, like GRouPcoin and DeVCoin are doing...

-MarkM-

[wumpus]

From my point of view performance and reduction of required resources should be a top priority.

Then get working on it! We need developers, not more people that try to determine what the priorities are.

Wouldn't a loading screen slowdown the startup? In addition it would feel like starting an application suite, not a tool for making a quick transaction.

No. Compared to the seconds it takes to load the data, the <0.1ms it takes to render an image to the screen doesn't make any difference (your browser decodes and renders zillions of images per second, do you really notice it?). And it communicates a lot to the user. Worry about the big fish.

Building a BTC client is f***ing hard.

+1