Author: Matt Corallo 2011-07-13 00:17:59
Published on: 2011-07-13T00:17:59+00:00
In this email thread, various topics related to Bitcoin are discussed. The first topic is about the creation of a new library called 'libbtc' by implementing a small module like IRC or P2P connection handling and using it in the client. This will create a clean code base without having a non-functional client for some time and will make it easy to maintain order. The second topic is regarding the usage of Db4 indexed database functionality without an SQL interface. Compared to an STL map lookup and fopen, fwrite and fclose, Db4 is much harder to understand and brings a lot of performance overhead but it provides good database transactioning which Bitcoin depends on under some circumstances. The third topic is about hardcoded values for the official and testnet block chains. It would be a great step to move all chain-related settings to a chain description file which would allow custom chains and clean up the code. However, alternate chains should be designed in such a way as to share the main chain's difficulty.Gavin Andresen suggests creating a much better client with a nicer internal architecture and a cleaner code-base. However, it is not feasible to ask everyone to stop using Bitcoin for six months while a new client is being developed. Instead, the focus should be on quick extendibility and more feature-rich secure code which would improve trust and result in better external Bitcoin-related projects.
Updated on: 2023-05-18T21:24:20.015594+00:00