MultiBit is a bitcoin client built using BitCoinJ. Jim Burton goes over the features and future of his and Gary Rowe’s client. It is a small client and does not demand many resources as it is aimed at the desktop user and does not perform the full blockchain validation. They have polished up a nice usable client and development is active. In the talk they discuss their various design rationales for the interface.
Swatches are a new concept in this client. By dragging a specially tailored swatch from a website or your desktop, the program can read in the bitcoin addresses and amounts.
To demonstrate swatches, they have developed a proof of concept merchant site using MultiBit Merchant where in order to pay for items, the customer drags the swatch images onto MultiBit, the program recognises the details and pops up a confirm dialog and the user confirms.
For bitcoin to grow as a decentralised system, an ecosystem of competing clients needs to be encouraged for the health of the network. We have many competing Linux distributions which makes developing an attack against Linux highly difficult. Likewise a varied gene-pool of bitcoin clients means a strong bitcoin network that is difficult to attack from any one angle. Diversity breeds strength. No one attack would be able to cripple the network if the network is varied. All our strengths, none of our weaknesses.
Half the audio is from the camera as the sound feed cut-off halfway. Apologies for the poor sound.
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