John Beatty is the co-founder of Clover and is obviously trying out the competition. At the moment, he's not impressed.
Bitcoin.org should point to a more user-friendly client, like MultiBit or Electrum, until the blockchain download requirement is removed from the Satoshi client. The Satoshi client should be recommended to "advanced" users only.
Ehhh I agree with some of your sentiment, but probably not a good idea for the most official bitcoin site to point to a client not developed by the core devs. Perhaps it should have a few options shown... I don't know a good solution. The initial block chain download is the worst part of the bitcoin experience, but it's pretty smooth sailing after that.
ReplyDeletethere's no way it takes up 2.4 gigabytes
ReplyDeleteSo true. The client does a very poor job explaining its use of the network (and therefore user wait time) to the user.
ReplyDeleteThe client already includes hardwired blockchain checkpoints. This is controversial, but if it's already bundling checkpoints then including a list of all account balances at the checkpoint is no worse, and would allow the client to start immediately after downloading only the blocks after the checkpoint.
On the other hand, the new Qt interface in 0.5 is already a huge UI improvement over 0.4, so the rate of progress is encouraging!
Bitcoin competes with the dollar (which is doomed), and with gold (wich can't be shoved down a transmission wire) - not with some wallet!
ReplyDeleteThe block chain could really benefit from some bittorrentification. Imagine if it was all distributed and tracked via DHT and every new block just would result in a new torrent hash, network publishes that new hash and then clients could magnet:ically download the new piece(s) ... just a slightly different way of getting blocks downloaded but doing it like that should make initial download go very fast.
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