I understand we're the only company to propose actually extending the core so there's a higher standard - but really btcd is kind of opaque which to my mind is a bit of a concern given that its proposed as a full node and creates risk of network fork as it has a reimplementation of consensus critical code.
Adam
That's quite an assertion. In what way is it opaque? The code is ISC licensed, freely available on github, and the issues are openly tracked via the github tracker. It also has has high quality comments and code documentation (frankly I would even contend that means btcd is actually _less_ opaque in that regard as the code is generally more modular and easier to follow).
Oh boy, thats another can of worms. You dont happen to work for conformal do you btw?
So (it a long story) but a) no one knows who's funding them; b) most of them seem to have ex-defence contractor profiles; c) no one knows why they are coding it; d) if there is one off by even a single bit interpretation bug in it it breaks consensus and forks bitcoin, which can likely be systematically abused, to create a massive accounting/double-spend mess that will be too expensive to repair as last time - that could create a mega fork worse than the leveldb bug, and kill bitcoin or force some really harsh choices to best effort cleanup where there are innocent losers; e) it apparently took a lot of effort by the core devs to persuade them that this was a problem; f) it still has that problem.
I think that about covers it.
Adam