Dear Bitcoiners,
Since the 1st of january I have officially left my previous job (computer scientist at INRIA) in order to work full time on the development of Electrum. My plan is to create a company, Electrum Technologies, that will distribute the Electrum software, and sell related services. This company project is now officially supported by the incubator of the french region Lorraine (http://incubateurlorrain.org/ ); we signed the contract yesterday.
I am now working on version 2.0 of Electrum. The following features are under development:
1. A Patricia tree data structure, also called "Ultimate Blockchain Compression", will be implemented in Electrum servers. This data structure allows a client to get the balance of any address instantly, and it will also generate a "proof of completeness" (the root hash of the patricia tree), that can be used to check that the server sent all UTXOs related to a given address to the client. A first implementation of this patricia tree was recently completed, and is available in the 'fulltree' branch of the Electrum server. This prototype uses a 256-way branching, and can import recent blocks at 2s/block. Following maaku's suggestion ( https://github.com/maaku/bips/blob/master/drafts/auth-trie.mediawiki ), I plan to upgrade it with binary branching. I also look forward to maaku's C++ implementation, which should be much faster than Python.
2. Version 2.0 will use BIP32 wallets with multiple accounts (this feature was initially planned for 1.9, but it had to be postponed)
Some of these accounts will have no "gap limit", so that merchants can create arbitrary numbers of addresses without messing with the internal parameters of their wallet.
3. Version 2.0 will have a daemon mode, that remains always connected, and that can be queried with json-rpc. This means that shell scripts will be able to use multiple Electrum commands without without opening and closing sockets for each command.
4. A 2-factor authentication service using multisig addresses is under development, that will be available in Electrum through a paying plugin. I made a demonstration of that service in Barcelona last fall, during the meeting organized by genjix. I am now working with lawyers, in order to define the terms of use for that service.
The ETA for version 2.0 (including points 2 and 3) is about 1 month from now. The multisig service (4) will probably require an extra month in order to be finalized.
I am looking forward to the coming months, and I hope to deliver the best possible software.
Thomas
Note: I will attend the Berlin conference in february; send me a note if you want to meet me there.
