Topic: Frog: Bitmessage for the web! (Read 8826 times)

what happened to your blog?

Jaxkr

You may want to look into this bounty for an android BM app

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bounty-working-bitmessanger-client-for-android-246692

Hey! You're one of the mysterious pledgers! Hello and thank you.
The Bitcoinstarter guy hasn't sent me the CSV yet, so I am completely in the dark on the identities of the pledgers.

Currently, development is going pretty smoothly. I've managed to perfectly replicate the Bitmessage PoW in JS, and that was the only thing I was nervous about. If you feel like it, help would be appreciated. I have PM'd you.

Hey,

I pledged 0.7 BTC and am willing to help you out as much as I can. I've been thinking about a project like this and I'm very happy more people are enthusiastic. Need help with the website, or any programming work?

Interesting ... so people with lots of mBTC can afford to send junk mails I suppose ... can a receiver set his 'postage' high enough to discourage low-ball (i.e. low difficulty PoW" messages from arriving?

I plan to release the client solely as a web app located on a site, rather than a browser app. This is for portability, so you can pick it up on your phone or another computer.

The proof of work is a sticky situation, and I might use asm.js or something of the like.
The exact 2 lines of code that do the PoW in PyBitmessage are
Unfortunately for me, this could not use more language specific features.
It's unpacking as a big endian unsigned long long. I haven't found a library to do this, as the node bufferpack and jspack don't support this type. I believe it's a limitation in JavaScript itself.
The next part of this in a double binary sha512 hash. I CAN do this in JS with nodejs code ported to the browser. However, the binary hashes don't match the python ones as JS can't handle binary data like that. The hex hashes match, though.

I'll go into detail on this when the dev blog is up. If anyone has any suggestions on how to implement this, I'd appreciate it.

First of all, before criticizing Bitmessage please understand how it works. You can read the whitepaper here. Bitmessage doesn't use a blockchain or anything very similar.

Secondly, Bitmessage is still tied to the desktop client. This app is a portable web client.

if it's easy to use, why the startup?

if it's easy to use, why the startup?

bitmessage is as easy to use

part of the value proposition with BitMessage was it was supposed to be easy to use.

seems the only remaining value proposition is "I Haz A Blockchain".

git clone https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage.git
cd PyBitmessage/src
python bitmessagemain.py

This is an argument against Bitmessage in general. You should talk to Atheros about that.
Also, email with PGP isn't truly anonymous nor is it decentralized. Your mail server could be seized or go down at any time.

Email with PGP is already ridiculously easy to use, works with existing infrastructure and has been PROVEN to be secure.

 -bm

It seems like Bitmessage won't become wildly popular unless we can make it ridiculously easy to use.
Frog will solve this by being a very easy to use Bitmessage client for the web.

How will Frog work?
Frog will function very similarly to the Electrum Bitcoin client. The user's client reads data from the network off of a pool of servers.
When you open the Frog application in your browser, it automatically connects to an available Frog server that runs the complete Bitmessage software. When you send a message, your browser completes the proof-of-work necessary for propagation, and sends it to a Frog node. Then, the Frog node follows the standard protocol to send the message to the Bitmessage network.

But, wouldn't this decrease decentralization?
Not really. Since the birth of Electrum, the community has put up dozens of servers for the client to use. This has resulted in the creation of reliable supernodes that benefit the entire Bitcoin network.

Just like Electrum, anyone can put up a Frog server for the clients to use. So the servers will not be controlled by a centralized authority. Also, since a proof-of-work is required for sending Bitmessages, attacking these servers will be very difficult. Frog nodes will have all the protections a regular Bitmessage node has. So Frog will result in the creation of supernodes, which will help the entire Bitmessage network

Will it be open source?
Yes.

What's your timeline?
I am currently on my summer vacation and have a lot of free time on my hands. I estimate having a funtional beta by August.

Frog will help conquer surveillance by putting great tools into more hands. Help us make it a reality.

Funding successful, and work begun a while ago!


Here is my GitHub, and a dev blog will be up as soon.

Thanks, I'll be looking forward to reading it, and congratulations on the funding.
One more question, since would your client is written in HTML5 (I'm assuming the PoW part will be separate or in asm.js) will it be making an appearance on the Firefox Marketplace once released?

nonce += 1
trialValue, = unpack('>Q',hashlib.sha512(hashlib.sha512(pack('>Q',nonce) + initialHash).digest()).digest()[0:8])