Quote from: beitris.dwlul on October 01, 2014, 02:23:01 PM

Java isn't really seen in a good light in the CryptoCoin community.

Perhaps I can change that opinion. I suppose that because Bitcoin Core was written by Satoshi in C++, that language is the traditional approach in cryptocurrency. C++ is arguably more performant than Java, but the latter's many security and productivity advantages are well known.

For example ....

1. Java has a number of excellent Integrated Development Environments which enable the faster design, writing, debugging and regression testing of applications. In contrast, Bitcoin Core developers often use command line tools.

2. Java is inherently safer than C++ in that security is provided by a runtime environment which abstracts the underlying operating system and hardware.

3. Java encourages reuse. Notably, I use the Bouncy Castle cryptography library in this project.

4. Java source code is easier to read and understand than the same behavior written in C++. Please look at the source for BitcoinJ on GitHub vs the Bitcoin Core source on GitHub. More programmers have been taught Java than C++. Unfortunately, I believe that Satoshi received a Computer Science degree before Java was popularized in the late 1990's.

5. The community you speak of probably does not develop applications for Android, the world's dominant mobile device operating system, which because of the reasons I mention, strongly favors their rebranded Java language.

Bitcoin Core developers are stuck with the messy C++ code Satoshi left them, and have been forced to rewrite half of it, according to Gavin Andressen. In this project I have made very modest changes to C++ Bitcoin Core to repurpose its testing behavior, allowing the creation of a new block every 10 minutes with a trivial proof-of-work. I treat bitcoind as a slave process entirely controlled and proxied on the network by Java software agents. Thus this project retains full feature and bug fidelity with the Bitcoin protocol, and compatibility with existing wallets and processors via a set of TexaiCoin seed IP addresses and port.

Writing in Java, i.e the NetBeans IDE on Ubuntu, enables me to swiftly explore alternative implementations of new features.

As suggested in a prior post by Scumby, I am currently working on keyless signature infrastructure as part of the tamper-evident log module. I am using SHA-512 hashing as provided by Bouncy Castle. Each full node's logs will be temporally salted with the current Solar Flux indicator and hashed into a network-wide, timestamped merkle tree whose root value is widely known and archived, e.g. into an operators' mail list. This prevents equivocation misbehavior by a peer which cannot undetectably report an incorrect version of its state to an attesting peer, who verifies the target peer's version state hash in the distributed provenance merkle hash tree.

I am so glad to be using Java.