The Long History and Disputed Desirability of Alternative Bitcoin Implementations
Coinciding with the opening of the Ethereum Foundation’s Devcon2 conference in Shanghai this week, significant parts of the Ethereum network were crashing. In what seemed like an attack using an intentionally difficult-to-execute smart contract, the much used Ethereum implementation Geth stopped functioning altogether, while another implementation —....
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Bitcoin was released to the public as an open source project that allows anyone in the world to not only transact in a decentralized manner, but also help modify the code. Many open source projects like Linux have started with the source code followed by a myriad of alternative implementations. However, for some reason, in the Bitcoin space alternative....
Amir Taaki's libbitcoin has come to be one of the most advanced alternative implementations of the Bitcoin protocol in existence. Although there are now dozens of alternative implementations on the market, libbitcoin is one of the few that re-implements the complete Bitcoin standard, allowing users to run a deterministic wallet, an elliptic curve message signing interface and, of course, a fully functional Bitcoin node. Even multisignature transactions, which many popular wallets including blockchain.info and Bitcoin Wallet for Android still do not support, libbitcoin handles just fine.....
Amir Taaki's libbitcoin has come to be one of the most advanced alternative implementations of the Bitcoin protocol in existence. Although there are now dozens of alternative implementations on the market, libbitcoin is one of the few that re-implements the complete Bitcoin standard, allowing users to run a deterministic wallet, an elliptic curve message signing interface and, of course, a fully functional Bitcoin node. Even multisignature transactions, which many popular wallets including blockchain.info and Bitcoin Wallet for Android still do not support, libbitcoin handles just fine.....
What are the implications for having multiple implementations of the Bitcoin protocol? Do the positives outweigh the potential bugs and other issues?
Bitcoin wallet security and technology is more important than ever these days. As the Bitcoin community grows larger, there are many people who use digital currency without taking the necessary security precautions. Luckily for them, companies such as BitGo are focusing their efforts on providing top-notch security to every Bitcoin user in the world. That strategy is paying dividends, as the company processed over US$1 billion in Bitcoin transactions during Q2 2015. Up until this point, there have been no breaches of BitGo’s security implementations. This is quite an impressive record,....