Topic: Android Bitcoin Client Bounty (1740 BTC pledged) - page 3. (Read 44770 times)

Can the 800 BTC pledgers please clear up which have been paid out? And how much there is to gain right now?

As to everyone else, please add to the bounty. I think this android client is really important. The open source mentality is nice and all, but we shouldn't rely on people working for free too much, especially now that time is of the essence. We're missing out on all those android fans who read about Bitcoin now, many would surely join if they had a full client.

The official client won't work on Android either. It loads the block chain at startup in the same way BitCoinJ currently does.

Glad to hear it! Will keep an eye on it, though I'm not entirely convinced of from-the-scratch implementations (thus the call for JNI).

As has been noted several times, BitCoinJ is not ready for use on Android yet. We know how to make it efficient enough for use on phones and the code to do that is coming.

No bounties needed. Just patience. By the way there are at least two other people working on Android GUIs for the library.

I've been inquired about this by my employer if this is viable, and I am pondering going for it making it open-source.

I've hacked together a semi-working prototype based on bitcoinj, however ran into obvious technical difficulties - bitcoinj is too fat and inefficient to the point i couldnt make a transaction.
After compiling bitcoind, the client was not able to verify (rescan) whole chain tx by tx in reasonable time, not to mention necessary use of sdcard.
The state in which code is now, no android device is up to the task except very hiend ones.

Following changes are needed to be made:
Trusting the blockchain to be correct from some point of time and start from specific merkle root is a neccessity, this should not be a problem as more than week-spanning tree forks are unlikely.
From there on, incoming txes are processed, stored locally only as blockheaders with possible forks in a backlog which gets consumed into the merkle root.

This is as lite it gets, is reasonably secure, easy on bandwith, and seems it will work on all ranges of androids way down to the severely lacking HTC Dream.

However blockheaders (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tree/blockheaders) and complete tx/wallet rewrite are necessary to cater for performance.

Starting from where it is now this is work at least for 2 months. Should i take the bounty, at the current rate I wouldn't go below 2500BTC.

Recommendation to the pledgers: split the tasks to smaller bounties (worth ~1500-2000BTC IMO):
1) separate protocol code from bitcoin client into a library, include "lite" operation as an option, to avoid hacks pegged on the back of bitcoin client (umaintainable mess)
2) make it efficient to run on underpowered devices
3) write an easy JNI binding bitcoinj style

The android frontend is a matter of 500BTC, no more. Same goes for iPhone.

therapist

Different pledges have different requirements.  An android remote control client has been developed, and I believe has been paid out.  Mine has not.

I'm not sure a full-fledged node is even the goal here, is it?


"runnable on one's own server" sounds to me like it's simply a rpc client, no?

Can the pledgers please clear this up?

I had the impression someone was working on the client, albeit slowly. The problem seems to be the blockchain and RAM usage.

I completely forgot about this for a while. Given the expected short-to-medium term value of Bitcoin, I think I'm going to revisit it. Though the OP should perhaps be updated to show that part of the bounty has already been paid out.

It does for me, and my previously stated conditions, to my stated bitcoin amount.  When I pledged it, 50 bitcoins was a tip.  Now it's a day's wages.

what's up with this?

does the bounty still hold?

1740 quite some money nowadays, noone up to this task? Andreas Schildbach's Wallet (for testnet) was almost there, wasn't it? (crashes my phone, but used to work just fine couple weeks ago)

The fee is a single, one-time $25 per person/organization. (Contrast this with Apple's $99 per YEAR.) The fee is charged whether you intend publish free or paid apps. Personally I paid it long ago and haven't published a thing yet, though I will be soon.

The fee is there to ensure all Market participants have been through the Google credit card anti-fraud system (which is pretty good). The point is to try and raise the bar for people uploading malicious or illegal apps.

It's not there to make a profit for Google, which is in no need of the poxy amounts of cash generated by it.

Wasn`t aware of the market fee. Shame on you Open Handset Alliance !

Wait, do free apps have to pay this fee also?

No. Since its not finished Im to cheap for the 25$ Android market fee ( which i find ridicolous considering google also collects a sales percentage :-)

I don't think you'll ever want to mine bitcoins on a phone, so that's not required. The bounty is not controlled by a single person so the requirements might differ. Most pledgers will probably agree that:

• It needs to participate as a node in the network (e.g. no remoting of a Bitcoin client running on another machine)
• Be able to receive and send bitcoins
• Be open source (GPL, Apache, BSD, you name it, but the source must be distributed and we must be allowed to reuse it in other places)
• Backup and restore would be nice

And as for the "Java Bitcoin client" there is none yet. There are only two implementations of the networking protocol: [mike]'s great work with bitcoinj (quite complete, and already at the base of a test client on android) and my BitDroid-Network implementation (which is quite unfinished because I wanted to put the blockchain and crypto operations into another module but never got to it, but I still maintain that for many connections mine performs better ^^).
I hope to see some of your code someday

I just got this new Android, and I might try porting the JAVA Bitcoin client to Android.  What would be the minimum requirements to claim this bounty?  If I can get a simple text or menu interface that is able to download the hash chain, mine coins, send coins, and do everything else that the regular client can do, does that mean I qualify for this bounty?  What is the approval process to obtain t he bounty involve?

Is BitCoiner available via the Market ?
(btw: I guess there are already two other implementations of that: "BitcoinDroid" and "Miner Status")

Installed fine, and fired up at first, but after inputting the neccessary data, I now get...

"Sorry!
The application BitCoiner (process net.lwl.bitcoiner) has stopped unexpectedly.  Please try again.

(Force Close)"

It doesn't seem to matter how many times I try.