Quote from: John Smith on August 05, 2011, 09:23:48 PM

If you don't trust me, that's up to you -- you're free to use any client that you want. Bitcoin is a distributed currency. There is no "official" bitcoin organization to endorse anything.

Everyone can audit all my code on github, that's how open source works. I would be incredibly stupid to backdoor it wouldn't I? Git remembers every change ever made to a code base. If I was really out to steal your coins there'd be much less time consuming ways that wouldn't put my reputation at risk.

I cannot help but take this as a bit of an insult. Good luck with your trust issues, but don't look at me for fixing them.

I have no issues trusting you, I've seen your posts here and on the bitcoin-dev mailing list and wouldn't have any issues either running a binary supplied by you or just simply building your code from source - in fact I suggested that you put binaries up to make your client more accessible to the masses. I think my point perhaps was poorly explained in my post. My point is that the average user is going to 1. Google for bitcoin, 2. click on the top link, and 3. download the windows client. If we want to work on the average user's user experience it's important that we concentrate efforts on improving the mainline client. The alternative to this would be to place easy to access and easy to install binaries on the bitcoin.org website so people can have a choice between your client and the mainline one. The only criticism I had was more a philosophical one that if someone comes in and says 'hey I'm going to fix this bug in mainline' or 'hey I'm going to add this new feature in mainline' then you pop into the thread and say 'oh I already have that in my client' - but very very few people are using your client (see above) then it makes volunteers far less likely to contribute to mainline (or at least that was how I felt when I said I was going to implement a usability feature in mainline in another thread)

I would prefer to see more activity on mainline, more people contributing e.g. to the test suites, stability improvements, UI improvements, audit of the code, assurance that mainline is being improved and released in a timely manor, than for the scant development resource to be thinly spread over several clients.

I totally understand why you started your client, probably a combination of the inertia of pulling code into mainline, and the belief that having client diversity is good for Bitcoin as a whole (both reasons I agree with, by the way )- but right now I go to the Newbie thread and try and help people and I see the same issues being reported over and over again and they really need to be fixed...

Apologies if my post came across as an insult, it wasn't meant as such.

Will