[ANNOUNCE] Webcoin Alpha Sneak Preview

[Stefan Thomas]

Hey everybody,

I just uploaded a little screencast as a preview of our upcoming code dump.

It's basically an implementation of a heavy-server, lightweight-client in JavaScript (Node.js on the server and jQuery in the client). Highlights:

- The server does NOT use the JSON-RPC API. The server uses node-bitcoin-p2p to connect directly to the Bitcoin network. Right now we still connect to a single trusted node because node-bitcoin-p2p lacks a full script interpreter for proper tx verification, but we're hoping to add that at some point.

- The server does NOT see your private keys. Transaction signing is done on the client side. Of course in a webapp the server can just serve you code that has you send it your private keys. But firstly, it still provides some protection against hackers, because the client HTML/JS can be hosted on a very secure static HTTP server, whereas all the dynamic node.js stuff is on a different machine. Secondly, future clients will be open-source desktop or mobile clients where the same checks apply as with the official client. (People can look at the code and make sure it doesn't send the private keys anywhere.)

Right now Webcoin is still pretty buggy, but we're planning to release the rest of the code and an official beta deployment very soon.

You can watch the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTmFwnIRG9c
(Sorry for audio sync issues and poor resolution - next screencast will be better in those respects. Also, you can download it in 1280x800 here.)

Follow our progress here:
http://twitter.com/bitcoinjs
http://www.bitcoinjs.org/
http://github.com/bitcoinjs

Tip here:
13SjwsodtKsAhQwPx14s7aqKpnooeep4i5

Contact us here:
bitcoinjs (at-sign) justmoon.net

And I'm happy to answer any questions here in the thread. Documentation obviously will be forthcoming, but based on your comments here I'll be able to get a sense what you guys are most interested in and therefore what we should focus on.

I've also got major thanks to give out to these fine folks:

- [mike] for BitcoinJ - much of our code is just a port of this excellent library
- Andrew Schaaf of Bitcoin Labs for reviewing the API and letting us use some of his code
- Gavin Andresen for reviewing the API documentation and providing feedback
- booo from github for JSLint'ing and cleaning up a lot of node-bitcoin-p2p
- jb55 from github for debugging and pull requests

Massive thanks to the guys at Trucoin who have supported this project every step of the way. I'd encourage everybody to keep a close eye on them, they are working on some badass stuff! They've also agreed to provide the funding for a reference Webcoin installation.

I want to point out that this is a preview, there are still plenty of bugs cropping up. We'll post a link to a demo installation once we get it a little bit more stable.

Cheers,

Stefan  

[ByteCoin]

I watched the video, and browsed the source code, especially the mathsy stuff. Looks good!

Note how it's built off bitcoinj rather than the C++ code. I wonder whether the development and the addition of new features will occur faster on this codebase and the C++ codebase will stagnate somewhat by comparison.

ByteCoin

[jimbobway]

Amazing...great work guys.

[Vasili Sviridov]

Donated Looks way cool and slick too.

[Mike Hearn]

Looks great! I've wondered for a while how practical a JavaScript implementation of BitCoin would be. Good to know modern engines are fast enough to handle it.

I took a browse through the code, I think you give BitCoinJ too much credit - it's clearly a fresh implementation, which is good. My only caveat is that if you're using the algorithms there for block chain reorgs, make sure to keep up with the latest version from svn head. I don't have re-org handling totally right yet, though it's getting closer. Also, I'm sure you're aware of this, but BitCoinJ does not implement all the rules of the network and so isn't safe to use yet - eg, it will happily generate transactions that don't meet the fee requirements and thus never confirm.

The UI is very clean. Really looking forward to seeing this develop and discussing it with you on Saturday.

[cypherdoc]

congrats guys.  nice work.

[dust]

This looks very promising... excellent work.

[Matt Corallo]

Brilliant, nice work.

[lulzplzkthx]

Wow. That is beautiful. Very nice job, and I might try it out in a few minutes.

Very cool.

[Stefan Thomas]

My only caveat is that if you're using the algorithms there for block chain reorgs, make sure to keep up with the latest version from svn head. I don't have re-org handling totally right yet, though it's getting closer.

Thanks for the heads-up. Re-org isn't working yet - there was a split yesterday and node-bitcoin-p2p threw an exception. I doubt I'll be able to get it working reliably until we have a proper test harness that can simulate a split.

Note how it's built off bitcoinj rather than the C++ code. I wonder whether the development and the addition of new features will occur faster on this codebase and the C++ codebase will stagnate somewhat by comparison.

The C++ code is the backbone of Bitcoin and will remain so for years to come. I think clients in other languages will fill certain niches as well as providing a testbed for new features.

Very nice job, and I might try it out in a few minutes.

We're still re-packaging and uploading the code. Here's the status:

Edit: Updated the list below. Everything is uploaded now, but probably not enough documentation to get it running especially given how buggy it still is.

node-bitcoin-p2p: online
node-bitcoin-explorer: online, cool little demo app, start here if you want to get your feet wet
bitcoinjs-lib: online, but no docs and pretty rough around the edges
bitcoinjs-gui: online, no docs, hardcoded settings, ...
node-bitcoin-exit: online, no docs
node-bitcoin-wallet: in development

[suntsu]

+1. very impressive demo. the prospect to run bitcoin in the browser to multiple computers, run it on a mobile phone and have secure wallet storage in the cloud looks very promising.

[caveden]

Great job!!

Regarding the issue of the server providing you bad scripts, how hard would it be to make this code a browser extension with a configurable connection point to access the bitcoin network?

[Dusty]

Very impressive stuff, very clever implementation, hat off!

[Stefan Thomas]

Regarding the issue of the server providing you bad scripts, how hard would it be to make this code a browser extension with a configurable connection point to access the bitcoin network?

Shouldn't be too hard. In the case of Firefox, you'd create a new extension, include bitcoinjs-gui as a subfolder and add a button that opens a tab with it using the correct chrome:// URL. You'd probably make some changes like add an options panel where people can choose a different exit node and use some other API than localStorage for storing the data.

[Hal]

Q on the video:

You received 1 btc, then before it was confirmed, made a payment of 0.1 btc. Was that payment real? When we cut to the future, the 1 btc tx had 2 confirmations, but the 0.1 had none. Both txns could have been confirmed in the same block. Do you know why that didn't happen?

[Stefan Thomas]

Q on the video:

You received 1 btc, then before it was confirmed, made a payment of 0.1 btc. Was that payment real? When we cut to the future, the 1 btc tx had 2 confirmations, but the 0.1 had none. Both txns could have been confirmed in the same block. Do you know why that didn't happen?

Yep, the transactions are real:

http://blockexplorer.com/address/1FhXuUHaww1qkn2Mb6BURZgR3T9xoyjQtz

The 0.1 BTC transaction got confirmed seven hours later. I haven't done any small fee-less transaction lately, but around the time when we recorded the video I had quite a few cases where that type of tx took a long time to confirm.

For example this is a 0.01 BTC fee-less transaction, sent with the official client (0.3.21) that took 32.5 hours to confirm:

http://blockexplorer.com/tx/0c1a398a2534c79639fcf9416b26aad3e5f5aa51a5907d79f2f5ff4fe927a5e9
Sent: 5/4/2011 01:59
Confirmed: 5/5/2011 10:24

[cypherdoc]

justmoon, can you clarify; where are the private keys stored esp. in the situation in the future when we have smartphone, laptop, and desktop clients?

[Steve]

This is really fantastic and I'm glad you chose to use JavaScript on the server.  It's great when you have only one language to deal with on both the client and the server.  Nice work!

Also, I like the architecture of keeping all private keys on the client and performing all transaction signing there.  I think this is the right way to do hosted wallets.

[LZ]

I can not find words!

[disq]

looking good, also it's good to see some nodejs action in a project about bitcoin