[VLM]

"send text posts limited to 140 characters"

That's just weird. Like putting horses reins on an early automobile, or putting a hopper in the front of the car to pour oats into.

"Bitcoin, in the sense of the digital currency, is not used at all"

I had to LOL at this. BTC is popular enough to try to piggyback completely unrelated things using the term as a lure. I've lived thru the "turbo" era, the "e-" and "i-" era and now we're entering the BTC era, where we can soon expect shampoos and hamburgers to be "BTC shampoo" and "BTC hamburgers" as a marketing gimmick.

[Touche]

The project is a fork of bitcoin, uses bitcoin blockchains, but because it doesn't use bitcoin currency they shouldn't mention the lineage?

[VLM]

Yes, at least not as a marketing scheme.

So this is a competitor of coinbase? Oh you mean its a miner. Oh no wait OK its like paypal but for BTC.

So... they copied some general source code concepts? Thats it? What a scam. Thats not real bitcoin support at all.

Its like saying a new game is internet compatible, in that if you install it on an internet connected computer its not incompatible with the OS. I actually saw this kind of thing during the early years of mass adoption of the internet. And now we'll see it in BTC.

[mikegioia]

From the FAQ:

    How is Bitcoin used here?

    Bitcoin, in the sense of the digital currency, is not used at all.
    However, the Bitcoin protocol and the implementation of the neat
    idea of block chain is on the basis of twister. The block chain 
    provides a sort of distributed notary service, certifying who owns 
    a given nickname. The name is associated with a specific key pair, 
    which is used for authentication and cryptography.

They're not using this as a marketing scheme! It's also not being used as a crytocurrency, they're merely forking the codebase to use the blockchain in their codebase.

[pacofvf]

The blockchain in twister is used as a distributed user registration database:

> How does it work?

> For the complete description you should refer to the white paper. But in short: twister is comprised of three mostly independent overlay networks. The first provides distributed user registration and authentication and is based on the Bitcoin protocol. The second one is a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) overlay network providing key/value storage for user resources and tracker location for the third network. The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint “swarms” of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol, which can be used for efficient near-instant notification delivery to many users.

[Touche]

You misunderstand, this project is literally a fork of the bitcoin repo. They didn't just "copy general source code concepts". It's right there on their about page.

[VLM]

"the implementation of the neat idea of block chain is on the basis of twister."

MS Excel uses do...while loops, my latest project uses do...while loops, therefore my project is based on Excel. I was reading it as algorithm use not literally forking the codebase as appears to be the case. Not everything using Quicksort is a kissing cousin of everything else using Quicksort, for example.

Its still cheesy as a marketing scheme. This thing's bitcoin, that means its a currency, right, or a funds storage system, or a psuedobank, or .. oh its a microblog service. LAME.

From a tech perspective I think its cool as an unusual use of the algorithm and technology.

[girvo]

Bitcoins block chain implementation and idea is innovative and revolutionary. Your do... while example is not. Also, the blockchain is sort of the most important bit of bitcoin. I struggle to see how you're missing this...

[swang]

The 140 characters is probably built-into the spec since there is no transfer fee like in bitcoin, therefore nothing would stop people from sending over large files to abuse the blockchain.

[VLM]

Heres a link to some binary to text encodings to abuse the blockchain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-to-text_encoding

With very modest client software modification, you could MIME encode any arbitrary binary file then squirt out one line of base64 per "post". Or the venerable uuencoded format.

What would prevent abuse would be some manner of throttling in the protocol to stop both this technique of blockchain abuse or arbitrary file length abuse.

I'm not thinking of apps like distributing cracked bluerays which would be fairly ridiculous, but much smaller binary files like a GPG key or SSH or whatever. Yeah yeah cut and paste whatever, why not automate it if you can. Click this menu option to send an extremely small file as a binary rather than screwing around with cut and paste.

[sln]

Stop spamming up this thread without even reading the damn protocol. The whitepaper is a whopping 12 pages and very explicitly states the mechanism used to prevent this kind of spamming. The post rate is throttled against the blockchain rate where "If a new Block k is produced every 10 minutes this limits the mean post rate of new users, for life, to a maximum of 288 posts/day. Average."

It's cool if you don't understand any of this, but you should try to stick to commenting on things you actually understand.