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Btcd - a Bitcoind Alternative Written In Go!
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at Conformal have announced btcd, an alternative full-node implementation to bitcoind, written in Go! They have released the first of their core packages, btcwire, available for download at GitHub. As a bitcoin user myself, I love the idea of a full alternative. It will only make bitcoin stronger and more independent. This will be great for the Go community, too!"
...in world full of banking problems, banking crises and eroding trust in fiduciary money. Way to go !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
TFS mixes the two: written in Go! and great for the Go community
TFA says: it's Go not Go!
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
It was a glottal stop and not an exclamation mark. He had the hiccups when he wrote the summary.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
What have you bought over the last year? How has their price varied in dollars and in bitcoins? No currency's value is constant, but some are a lot more constant than others.
All they have released is a handler for the network protocol. This doesn't verify blocks, send transactions or anything else. Are the other parts closed source or do they just not exist?
As Bitcoin alternatives go, I really liked the idea behind Namecoin. Not that it's likely to go anywhere, but it's something that puts some real backing, value, to the currency while simultaneously doing something to address the piss poor domain name allocation system that we have right now. Bitcoin is currently just floating on enthusiasm and greed, this would actually have some worth if people got behind it.
The value of bitcoin is tied to the disposable income of the people who live in that country.
If the dollar crashes, so will Bitcoin.
No sig today...
omg that's the stupidest thing I ever heard.
and to think that Go! was first.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
My 6 year old loves to doodle with his crayons. Lately, I've been having him draw money. So far, the good ones are really rare. So I figure they are probably worth a substantial amount of money. I'm going to start releasing them as currency soon. I'm also working out a deal with Paypal to accept them.
Doesn't pass my sniff-test.
I get suspicious any time someone is selling $1000 for $1.
Bitcoins have gone from worthless in 2010 to $120 a coin in 2013
$120 is only today's price. It can go down.
“...the system is secure as long as the honest nodes collectively control more [computing] power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.” - Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin.
ie. If governments or bot-herders want to destroy Bitcoin, they can.
In fact, if I was a bot herder I'd be busy working on a way to manipulate the price of bitcoin for fun and profit.
No sig today...
using this software, I can set up my own BitPonzi<tm> money scheme.
i'll make squillions, sell it all to buy gold, and then go retire in some libertarian utopia like Somalia, where wealth rules and i can even own other people if i want without evil socialist rules against perfectly legitimate sales contracts.
It's an alternative to the client, written in the same protocol, and thus compatible. Hurr durr durr.
Please: observe that "Go!" and "Go" are two quite different programming languages.
The client appears to be written in "Go" which is the language by google, but the headline would suggest "Go!" by McKabe & Clark.
I find the same ambiguity in the text... still, I am looking forward to the time we shall use the full unicode range in order to have
similar looking, yet entirely different, names. That shall be fun!
Given the (currently tiny) market for goods buyable with bitcoins, their 'value' is heavily dependent on the health of the exchanges where you can cash out into some other currency.
Incidentally, those exchanges appear to get hacked and/or DDsSed every couple of months...
With the GPU, FPGA, and ASIC miners either online or coming-real-soon-now, bot-herding in order to outcompete honest nodes is a substantial computational challenge, CPU miners are just too pitiful; but it would seem that the real weakness to exploit is the (much softer) underbelly of conventional web infrastructure and the price swings that attacks on that part of the bitcoin economy can create.
The trade between bitcoins and USD looks sort of like the buying and selling of stock, in a world where it's totally normal for the NYSE to be firebombed multiple times per year...
Go and Go! are very different language, which one was it programmed in?
GO: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)
GO!: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)
They chose a bad, confusing name: btcd. It is only nmemonic for the thing for which they want to provide an alternative. Some people will wonder "Is it Bitcoin or not?"
Why not choose "Gocoin" or something more distinct?
Your post is extremely interesting, but the mandatory conclusion I make from it is the exact opposite of yours. If the original code is so full of idiosyncracies and gotchas then it's an extreme liability to everyone who values Bitcoin, and quite likely contains backdoors or deliberate weaknesses that are hidden by the obscurity.
There can be no more important task for the Bitcoin community I think than to specify all elements of the static protocol and dynamic behavior of all parts, and reimplement them in other languages, especially safe languages.
Go is certainly a good candidate for this large body of work, safe, clean, and fast.
Its a market like auction houses or friendship networks: there basically isnt no reason fro a #2 or #3. Bitcoin may not be the winner due to it flaws, mainly speed.
Plenty of chains exist, some (like namecoin) are based on Bitcoin. (btc-e has a list of 'em).
However a coin on each chain is only worth the amount someone else will pay for it. And for none-bitcoin that is not much. Litecoin seams to have some traction (as a micro payment focused version).
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
"Honest" in the sense of the paper outlining bitcoin's design.
Essentially, the obvious problem with a naive attempt at 'digital currency' is double spending: Unless you have a central authority of some sort, that clears all transactions, how do you prevent me from taking Bitcoin #2435345345 and sending it to two or more people?
An 'honest' node is a node performing operations such that bitcoin's decentralized anti-double-spending mechanism is upheld. A 'dishonest' or 'attacking' node is one using its CPU power to undermine the hash chain.
It has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism, or capitalism being honest or dishonest. My point was that(with the advent of extremely high performance specialized hardware) people who control botnets(that merely have CPU time, and maybe GPU time) are in an increasingly poor position to control more than a trivial slice of the computational capacity of the bitcoin network as a whole, which would prevent them from double-spending or other transaction-subverting attacks.
"first they ignore you"
"then they attack you"
Sounds like the start of a seven step program to get a cult into the mainstream.
Prices in chickens do not make drastic jumps, except in a few rare cases of dysfunctional economies (ie, Zimbabwe). Chickens in euros or dollars have relatively slow changes in prices over time and those changes are usually related to supply and demand and not fiscal policies.
Bitcoin is a political movement by amateur economists, or a piece of performance art, or both. Not sure which. Everything about it seems designed to be a parody of currency and fiscal policy.
So the mining bot herds aren't running a miner that credits a pool account? They are actively trying to subvert the block chain?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
So the mining bot herds aren't running a miner that credits a pool account? They are actively trying to subvert the block chain?
I assume, given the difficulty of subverting the block chain(you'd need to have a botnet large enough to constitute more than half of the processing power across the entire network), that anybody mining on botnets is acting 'honestly' with respect to the bitcoin network, if not necessarily with respect to the people who own the computers being botted. Subverting the block chain would be a major coup, either if you wanted to destabilize the bitcoin scene or just cash out and burn the world behind you; but my understanding is that there is no 'partial credit' for such an attempt. Either you succeed, and control the block chain, or you fail, and get nothing. Pool mining, by contrast, has no real jackpot scenario; but offers partial credit in rather small increments.
Back when CPU mining was still the major mover, it was much more plausible(though also of interest to many fewer people) that somebody could steal enough CPU cycles to dominate the mining capacity. Once GPU mining hit, the value of computers without rather specific hardware configurations fell through the floor. FPGAs and ASICs upped the game further, and those are something that you are never going to find except on other people's bitcoin mining rigs(unlike GPUs with reasonable compute power, which aren't terribly common, compared to Intel Integrated; but are found in the wild among gamers and the like).
Bitcoin is NOT immune to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
Unless https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry#Adverse_selection is implemented in Bitcoin protocol, I'd not invest my time/money in it.
Casteism
I have several problems with it, and have made many negative posts about it, but at this point I consider it an interesting early experiment with digital currency, one that will be the seed for something better down the line.
It would be more of an experiment if the experimenters were disinterested observers. Instead the early adopters and creators stand to make a whole lot of money from this if they can convince people to legitimize the system. We get upset when drug researchers turn out to have financial stakes in their products, and the same should apply to economic "researchers".
It would be more of an experiment if the experimenters were disinterested observers. Instead the early adopters and creators stand to make a whole lot of money from this if they can convince people to legitimize the system.
To play devil's advocate, from their point of view it was a legitimate effort to put forward a new system, one that at least on some level is working. As for the windfall the creators and early adopters would get (assuming they kept their bitcoins), that's no different than any innovators typically get. A good example would be one of the credit card networks like Visa.
From my point of view, the problems are too big for me to take it seriously, and like you I'm bothered by the huge head start the early adopters have gained. However, if something better comes along and actually replaces Bitcoin, having learned some lessons and copied some ideas, then Bitcoin deserves a lot of credit for blazing a trail.