jonpaul

Lead developer of http://cryptocoinjs.com here. Also maintainer of https://github.com/cryptocoinjs/ecurve (what bitcoinjs-lib) uses for EC operations. I've worked with the lead developers of bitcoinjs-lib on ecurve so I think that I'd be qualified to answer this.

The main reason was that (1-2 months) ago when we were cleaning up ecurve, we had considered using your elliptic library, but we had problems with such simple operations in bn.js (your big integer library that elliptic depends upon) where arithmetic was incorrect for simple operations like -1 + 2 = -3 (don't quote me on that exact one). So at the time, we felt it wasn't battle tested. But they (we?) have every intention of switching to elliptic in the future.

Yup. I would have never thought about using Google drive to share PDF publicly. Now that I know, still not sure I would. You're damn right, interface does matter.

This is awesome! But I can't see it surviving on donations. Commercialize it please so that it survives. Tasteful ads aren't so bad like what Reddit does or Carbon[something]... I'm just concerned you won't survive on donations.

Seems like a good opportunity to use [Gitlab](https://about.gitlab.com/) and a perhaps even a hosted Gitlab install? I know there are commercial hosted Gitlab providers, I can't seem to recall any though - a cursory Google search isn't returning much ATM.

Wow. Did you make this? Put some contact info on your page if so! Implement history and labels and you have me as paying customer. No joke.

Browserify is great for npm/CommonJS modules on the browser side. Also, you can just check if `process.browser` is defined. =)

The problem with introducing new keywords and doing this in a backwards incompatible way, is that we'll be running with three module systems for years: CommonJS, AMD, and ES6. As far as I can tell, and please correct me if I'm wrong, it looks like ES6 modules aren't solving any new problem that CommonJS did not solve. Browserify does an excellent job of bringing CommonJS to the browser and it's gaining a lot of momentum. With ES6 now pushed back until June 2015... I'm not sure what to think anymore.

Have you considered using node-webkit, AngularJs, and Bootstrap for your cross platform GUI needs?

As a consumer of the API, I can attest that the developers of HelloBlock have a put a lot of thought into the API. Developers of Bitcoin apps might find the Testnet faucet particularly useful: https://helloblock.io/docs/ref#faucet

I honestly thought TOML (https://github.com/mojombo/toml - created by founder of Github) was a good configuration format. But unfortunately, I'm not sure that Tom has been a good steward of it and most of the interest in the early dies died off because Github issues would go unanswered or unresolved for months.

Shameless plug: https://github.com/cryptocoinjs (Bitcoin JavaScript fork of the original BitcoinJS) Right now, we're focused on Bitcoin, but we're moving fast and will be expanding support for altcoins. Also, if you're interested in the intricacies of addresses and Bitcoin, I'd encourage to read a very detailed article that I wrote on Bitcoin Addresses and JavaScript: http://procbits.com/2013/08/27/generating-a-bitcoin-address-... Doesn't use CryptoCoinJS yet as the article was written before I started CryptoCoinJS.

Looks cool! How are you actually embedding messages into the blockchain?

Shameless plug, but I also have a Go module named Goatee. However, it's a testing package: https://github.com/jprichardson/goatee-go It's too bad that discoverability of modules in Go sucks.

There is no project... just experimentation with LevelDB. All of those solutions that you provided require an installation of CouchDB on the server side. Therefore, a bit out of scope of building a quick hacky Firebase clone using LevelDB modules.

I'm sorry. Please accept my apology as that wasn't my intent. As a student of both writing and communication, I subscribe to the belief of that a person should write not to be understood, but to not be misunderstood. Clearly I've failed at that.

My point was that I don't think that regulation is the answer. I honed in on the idea that regulation has failed in the past (I have more research to do here) and thus, maybe alternatives should be considered. I wasn't trying to imply that because laws don't prevent criminals, that we should not have laws. Obviously, that's ludicrous. It's ludicrous because regulation != laws, or the principle of having laws. I think we can safely say that regulation may be an implementation of a law, or a specific law. Much like pizza is food, but not all food is pizza. Follow me so far? So, philosophically, if we have a bad set of laws, I wasn't suggesting that we throw out all laws, I was suggesting that we look for alternatives to the bad set of laws. To bring it home a bit more to other areas in modern society, it'd be like if I said that I think the war on drugs is failure, "tell me how the war on drugs has helped stopped drug abusers and criminals" and then you were to respond with your same response of "And laws against theft don't prevent all theft so theft should be legal." when that clearly wasn't my position.

Does this clear up my position a bit? Anyways, sorry I came off as a jerk.

Wow. I encourage you to study logical fallacies. In particular: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman

I never held the position that you stated.

Tell me how regulation stopped Enron. Tell me how regulation stopped the 2008 financial crisis with the housing bubble. These all happened in traditional markets.

You're right that some Bitcoin companies have screwed their users. Consumers need to educate themselves on who they're doing business with. A lot of these Bitcoin companies operated anonymously without impunity. Coinbase is an entirely different case. They are a US based company with VC backing. You know who you are conducting business with.

If you as a consumer want to purchase something from a company that isn't transparent, you don't know where their located, and don't know who's behind the operation, it doesn't matter whether you send bitcoins or your credit card number. It's still stupid. Common sense must prevail somewhere.

No way. Regulation won't solve these sort of things. It will just make the barrier to entry that much higher. Now people have a voice more so than ever before. If companies don't act appropriately, people can post stories and complaints online. The companies reputation will then suffer. This is exactly what's happening here.

You're forgetting two key points:

1) Ben is not a native English speaker, so as stated by Ben, he didn't realize it was a big deal.

2) The committer didn't sign a CLA yet.

I wrote a comprehensive article on addresses and how they work. I've even included the BitcoinJS JavaScript library on the page so that you can experiment and follow along. Here it is: http://procbits.com/2013/08/27/generating-a-bitcoin-address-...

Yep. Along with `== null`. I also only use "==" with `typeof` since `typeof` always returns a string.

Yea, or you could use "===".

https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1419 :)

I've been experimenting a bit with RethinkDB within the last few days. Its stability is definitely not there (too be fair, they've made this clear), so it's crashed when I needed it most. But here are the finer points:

1) Their team is extremely responsive. In fact, the most responsive team that I've dealt with on Github. I've posted at least 4 Github issues during various times of the day and evening and I've gotten a response in less than 10 minutes. Most of the time, more than one member responded.

2) They are not over selling their product like MongoDB did. They are very clear about what their product does and doesn't do.

3) Clustering is stupidly simple. You can have one setup within minutes and have your servers geographically located throughout the world.

4) The web UI makes administering the databases easy and fun.

After they get the kinks (stability & docs) fixed, this database will definitely have a bright future.

Shameless plug (just wrote it yesterday): Getting Started with Ansible on Digital Ocean - http://procbits.com/2013/09/08/getting-started-with-ansible-... (instructions will work with just about any remote Linux server)

Maybe, maybe not. But if you only rely upon the client-side feature of the app and if code signing is employed, you could safely use the app without fear of potentially your private data being stolen (assuming the original code doesn't send private data to the server).

Exactly. That's why I'm advocating for a signed JavaScript/HTML/webapp standard of some sort.

Not as far as I know... I could run a server that serves up HTML/JS and if that JS was modified by an attacker who hacked the server, consumers of my HTML/JS wouldn't know regardless of whether it's served up on HTTPS or not. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyone interested in signed JavaScript?

Initiatives like this are great. However, I'm most interested in signed JavaScript. I'm surprised that there isn't more of a discussion going about this since JavaScript crypto is near worthless if it's served from an untrusted server.

For example, let's say that you have an application that uses client-side crypto in JavaScript. Then let's assume that the server (that serves up the client-side app) is hacked and the client-side application is modified to send your private keys back to the hacked server, there is currently no way you'd know as the consumer of that client-side application. If signed JavaScript existed, then browsers could alert you that the JavaScript that you're running has been modified and doesn't match the signature, so it refuses to execute it.

Nice work. You may want to look into collaborating with these guys: https://github.com/angular-widgets/angular-jqm Basically, they are using the jQuery Mobile CSS (no jQuery though) with Angular.