Quote from: witchspace on December 11, 2010, 08:11:04 PM

Quote from: farmer_boy on December 10, 2010, 10:43:43 PM

Another client is useful, especially since the current Bitcoin client is a big mess. I was *shocked* that cryptography code looked like this.

Can you be more specific? What exactly makes it a 'mess'?

There is no object oriented design. Basically there is one big global state and that's it.

Very specifically line 24 in my SVN chechout contains the following number, but there is no explanation as to why this number is there; I can guess why it is there, but it shouldn't be my task to figure out why something is there. A comment above this constant should say why exactly it is that value and not some other value, why it is important for the system, etc.

Additionally a comment should state which hashing function is being used. E.g. it should say "The magic constant below is equal to the sha256sum (See, ) of value . This is done, because . "

Code:

uint256 hashGenesisBlock("0x000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f");

There is also no need to create a 3200 lines long source file. There is just no reason to do that other than to discourage people from making the effort to understand it.

I am sure it is possible to reverse-engineer it in a few months to get it into a state in which one can just read through the whole program in an hour or so, but that's not the same as it already being in such a state.

Anyway, I hope you see the difference in approach.