I am currently studying Enterprise Development BA at the University of Huddersfield and I have a very exciting business idea for bitcoin that would make use of cbitcoin.
So... please don't take this the wrong way, but what's your prior experience creating and shipping high-quality software?
I'll make another point: what's your prior experience with working with others? Part of what you're asking money for is to have the option to hire people to do some of the work for you, and in addition you're also asking for help with the codebase. I haven't done much management myself, but I have done just enough to know it's surprisingly difficult. Do you even have experience even just contributing to an open-source project, or working as a programmer in a large group? The people skills of setting expectations, negotiating technical compromises and so on are surprisingly hard to learn or do right without experience, well, doing just that. Frankly you're going to waste peoples' donations and time if you haven't had experience doing this before; at least have solid experience working in a group on software. It doesn't have to be fancy - some web-programming for a website is fine - but it has to be real and it has to be in a group.
Myself I'd feel better even if you were able to say you worked as a shift manager at a fast-food resturant; seriously, even that kind of experience would make a big difference to your success with hiring others on the project or with working with other volunteer contributors. Right now I just get the impression you manage to come off the wrong way with others in the community.
Maybe you're a prodigy and will get it right the first time, but you're already at 'cbitcoin 2.0' because you weren't happy with how 'cbitcoin 1.0' was turning out. See the solidcoin/microcash saga for an example of how over-promising "1.0/2.0/3.0" releases destroys confidence.
And maybe you CAN point to some other successful software you wrote and shipped when you were 17, in which case I'll shut up and leave you alone.
I'm 27 now, and I remember my projects ten years ago that I thought were going to change the world... and they didn't. Do the right web searches and you can probably still find some emails on the Freenet project development lists among others that I now find kinda embarrassing to say the least.
I've got this timestamping project I'm working on right now. It's not as far along as your library, 2500 lines vs. 9800, but still, you notice how probably no-one here actually knows the name of it? I might think it's going to change the world, but I don't want to waste people's time on a project that doesn't really exist yet. There's nothing wrong with eventually asking for donations and asking for help, but get something concrete first that's actually getting used in the real world to do a real task, then start thinking about where you're going to go next. You're also not going to really understand how your software should be architectured until you're at that point.
Myself I've set the goal that my timestamping thing needs to be able to create and validate timestamps, and a user should be able to do that out of the box. It doesn't have to be pretty or nicely documented, but it has to do something real and useful. I know I'm not really going to understand if my idea even makes any sense until I'm at that point. For instance for you, you're not going to know if, say, writing it in C makes any sense until you try integrating cbitcoin with a real-world C application using it. You also won't know if you're library interface makes sense until someone else tries to integrate *their* application with your library; IE, the point where they'll decide "yeah, lets send some money to this guy and improve it" Speaking of, the discussion on the forums about the license for cbitcoin is a good example: you'll understand better what sort of licensing works for people when people actually want to use your library for a real-world application.
Making a big deal about the project before that point is just going to make people think it's a bunch of vaporware, and people are also going to think I'm wasting a lot of other peoples time on the forums. I'm definitely not at the point where I can ask others for money to further the development effort. Posting occasional status updates and progress reports is fine, but just like me you're a long way away from going further than that.
tl;dr: In open-source useful working code speaks louder than anything else.
How about instead of ad hominem attacks you actually read through his 9000 lines of code already written and find something concrete to criticize? Wouldn't that be more relevant and productive than questioning his capability based on a brief observation? And why not encourage him to try and fail if nothing else, it's not like his failure will be forced upon anyone else but his success might be good for a lot of people, no?
jgarzik and others have raised very good points on why his failure does have the potential to do a lot of harm to others. Splitting the network with incompatible implementations is a very real risk and does have the potential to harm everyone in the community. In addition bad PR from software failures affects us all.
Besides, I want to see Matthew become an open source contributor, and much of being an effective open source contributor has nothing to do with technical skills.
The library is not rough around the edges; it's incomplete. It doesn't completely work, it has many problems... because it's incomplete. I'm working on it (help appreciated).
