The best new Bitcoin PROJECT from China! (Tablets and BITCOINS)

[SgtSpike]

To give you some kind of info about what kind of problem this is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX46Qv_b7F4

But for starters, the developers need not to worry that much - just make simple lightweight clients or something, and if they really bundle their devices with those, awesome! It hink the chinese goverment won't even think about bitcoin for a long time...

Yes, exactly this!  Get it going ASAP, and if/when the Chinese government tries to block it, THEN work on solutions for getting around said block.

[1714106075]

1714106075

[casascius]

Ad-hoc networks cannot be controlled by authorities. The nodes themselves are the routers. The only way they could control such a thing would be to physically search each node, seize them and punish their operators somehow.

Ohhhh... I get it, he means "ad-hoc" in the Wi-Fi sense.

So all of the Bitcoin nodes in the whole country have to be within a couple hundred feet of one another.

I know China is population dense and all, but I am not convinced that would work... if it was that magic, all of Africa would be online with it by now. China seemingly has no qualms about punishing operators of things they don't like... they just... disappear and become organ donors, or human body exhibits at the Luxor in Las Vegas.

[Piper67]

I don't think anyone here is giving the Chinese government much credit. There are alternatives other than the PRC clamping down on Bitcoin. If there are enough bright men and women in the lower echelons of the government, who are capable of understanding Bitcoin and its implications, it could quite easily turn into China either accepting Bitcoin or co-opting it.

If you think about it, a country that tends to keep its own currency artificially deflated could very well see Bitcoin as a way to offset the pitfalls of an artificially deflated currency. Keep the Yuan for intra-Chinese commerce, adopt Bitcoin for international commerce and profit from the spread between them.

You have to figure the entire country cannot possibly be so stupid as to have knee-jerk reactions. Someone, somewhere, is looking long and hard at this and trying to figure out what the best course of action would be.

[Mike Hearn]

I'm happy to discuss the technicalities of this with you guys. You can join the bitcoinj list mailing list here:

  https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/bitcoinj

or we can discuss here too, though it's a bit less convenient.

Here's a quick summary of the possible approaches:

• Satoshis code relaying transactions. Not going to happen on a power / memory / storage constrained device like a tablet. We can safely put this to one side.
• A "simplified payment verification" (SPV) client, like anything bitcoinj based such as Android Wallet. This doesn't do a whole lot for the network but it allows people to make/receive payments with their tablet, which could make a lot of sense for point-of-sale applications. It has the advantage of not having any central servers that can be blocked with a simple firewall rule, and the privacy is good because you just use the regular P2P network. However it does still have some delays and is more resource intensive than the third option. And some modern features people want like deterministic encrypted wallets aren't available. Over time these problems can be fixed but with todays code, that isn't the case.
• A superlightweight client like BitcoinSpinner. This has the advantage of being instant-on and quite robust on the client side. The problem from the China perspective is that the server (and thus the governments) knows all your keys, can therefore connect all your transactions, and can also block connections to the remote server breaking the app. Whilst these clients can in theory be pointed at different servers, you have to find such a server, decide you trust the operator, and reconfigure your client. In practice most users wouldn't do that. They'd just assume the app was broken and uninstall it.

My preference is obviously for the bitcoinj SPV approach design-wise, but it does have risks. The code develops slowly as I don't have much time to work on it, and in general fitting the pure P2P approach onto a phone or tablet involves some solving some tricky data structure and optimization problems. Long term it'll end up the best approach IMHO, but in the shorter term something like piuks wallet may work better. It boils down to timelines.

Bear in mind just being preloaded onto tablets, does not mean anyone will use the apps. There are still many problems none of these apps solve:   how do you educate users about Bitcoin? How do you make it easy to buy small amounts without setting up an account at an exchange? How do you help users find each other so they can trade?

The amount of work here is just enormous, and I'd like to see as much of it as possible be shared between client developers regardless of which protocol design they choose.

[MemoryDealers]

are you going to run full bitcoin nodes on those tablets?
are they for exportation or for the chinese domestic market?

I will defer to people with more knowledge in regards to what kind of software should be installed.

The majority of their tablets are sold in the domestic Chinese market,  but they ship a substantial amount world wide.

[kangasbros]

From current solutions, I would go with BitcoinSpinner. While other clients are OK, waiting for anything like block chain updates are jsut pain in the ass for average Joe, and will amke them hate bitcoin.

[weex]

From current solutions, I would go with BitcoinSpinner. While other clients are OK, waiting for anything like block chain updates are jsut pain in the ass for average Joe, and will amke them hate bitcoin.

And I would strongly recommend something more like Bitcoin Wallet for Android since the blockchain doesn't get stored and it can't be so simply blocked/shut down. The next step should be building more servers like the one powering BitcoinSpinner(at least for markets where the government is assumed to get involved as soon as they hear about it).

[ThomasV]

are you going to run full bitcoin nodes on those tablets?
are they for exportation or for the chinese domestic market?

I will defer to people with more knowledge in regards to what kind of software should be installed.

The majority of their tablets are sold in the domestic Chinese market,  but they ship a substantial amount world wide.

I see. Note that Electrum could be used.
It is now available for Android, although the Android gui is not as advanced as the Qt version.

[Foxpup]

Ad-hoc networks cannot be controlled by authorities. The nodes themselves are the routers. The only way they could control such a thing would be to physically search each node, seize them and punish their operators somehow.

Ohhhh... I get it, he means "ad-hoc" in the Wi-Fi sense.

So all of the Bitcoin nodes in the whole country have to be within a couple hundred feet of one another.

I know China is population dense and all, but I am not convinced that would work... if it was that magic, all of Africa would be online with it by now.

It's not magic. The few nodes that are connected to the Internet have to pay the bandwidth costs of the entire network, which for most Internet services increases in proportion to the size of the ad-hoc network. But, and this is the cool part, the Internet bandwidth used by a (full) Bitcoin node does not depend on the size of the ad-hoc network - you still download the same number of blocks and relay the same number of transactions regardless of how many ad-hoc peers you have. Each node could connect to hundreds or possibly even thousands of other nodes on the ad-hoc network (which doesn't cost anything and the only limit is how much bandwidth the hardware can physically handle) while simultaneously attempting to connect to a handful of nodes on the Internet (if and when a Bitcoin-friendly Internet connection becomes available).

I'm not 100% certain it would work either (as you say, each node needs to be in close proximity to another node), but this is exactly the sort of application that ad-hoc networks are good at, so I think it has a real chance of success. Remember, the ad-hoc networking is in addition to the Internet connection, not instead of it (and in fact it's completely useless without it), so even if the ad-hoc networking is a complete failure, it still functions as a regular relay node.

[apetersson]

afaik, large-scale mesh ad-hoc networking on mobile devices is still an unsolved problem.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

Nice, but there is a small problem. Everyday a new flaw MAY be discovered within bitcoin software, I can't imagine 150k people updating their tablets just to get the new client update(assuming they ALL use Bitcoin).

[farfiman]

Nice, but there is a small problem. Everyday a new flaw MAY be discovered within bitcoin software, I can't imagine 150k people updating their tablets just to get the new client update(assuming they ALL use Bitcoin).

Why not?  Updates to software happen all the time.

[Dusty]

I know China is population dense and all, but I am not convinced that would work... if it was that magic, all of Africa would be online with it by now.

Work in progress... the Serval Project is a project with the aim of implementing a mesh network targeting Africa.

[cbeast]

This was a cool thread. Is any of this beyond the vaporware stage?

[MooC Tals]

Definitely a game changer imho

[Vernon715]

IMHO, i think that btc clients should be able to operate behind tor.

this would remove many of the difficulties related to the Chinese communicating that have been talked about in this thread.

[Evan]

I don't own a tablet, smartphone, or even a portable DVD player. I don't even like wall-phones, and I hate the idea of paying ~$80 for a phone contract when all I'd do is use it as a super-shitty netbook.

But... I'd buy this, if only to show support.  Keep us updated!

Agreed

[Nemesis]

I think Rogers had 5 hrs of beers and drugs.... so they can all talk vaporware.

Any chance this company is the shitty  "COBY" brand?

I sure hope Rogers didnt pay for beers if it is.

[franky1]

having a full node running in the background for users that don't even know about bitcoin is not a good thing.
imagine microsoft re-develop their onlive service so that each user of windows is part of their network much like a torrent system so that everyone was whether they want it or not was getting things downloaded and uploaded from their PC.

BLOATWARE / Malware / ADWARE comes to mind.

i would simply have a light app that allowed people when clicking on it to act like an android app that talks to a blockchain.info wallet or something similar.



no secret/always running in background, no bloated taking up gigabytes of hard drive, no hours of slow internet and computer sluggishness while it downloads the blockchain.

something that PiUK should definitely get involved in

a simple and light wallet with a nice small presentation/tutorial/ introduction to bitcoin.

[Rothgar]

Pretty awesome

Perhaps Piuk of Blockchain.info would build his android app with a special branded skin/UI for that company...

I also think it's a given in this discussion that the app would not be a full blockchain downloading app, but rather a thin client.

Also - perhaps each tablet should come with maybe 1btc or .1btc loaded in its balance already. The company would need to hedge prices by buying the bitcoins upfront.

This is a great idea.  Blockchain.info already has Chinese as a language option.