Fastcoin Forum

First off, this post is only opinion - please take it as such.

I've been using Fastcoin for a bit now, and what I see is a really eager community of people who want Fastcoin to be the new Bitcoin, and even better it. I think it's all possible, except for a number of issues that need to be addressed. I tried introducing a few friends to Fastcoin recently, but they all had massive issues. One of them uses Linux, and the other uses Windows. Here's how it went:

The Linux user could not compile the client. I managed to get it compiling (I use Linux too) but only due to about 4 hours of dependency hunting and bug fixing on my part. It was a complete pain in the ass, even for Linux, and something I hope not to have to do again. After we got the client running, we had another problem. The system took AGES to synchronise with the network. Now I understand how crypt-currencies work, and I am aware that it's a limitation of how the network functions. But after searching, I could not find a bootstrap.inf file anywhere to allow faster syncing. It was very annoying, so we ended up waiting 8 hours for it to work. And this isn't even running on a niche distro, it's elementary OS Luna, which is based on Ubuntu 12.04...

The Windows user tried running their client, and it failed to start often. It was a nightmare. When it did, he got multiple errors (I'm not sure what they were). It finally managed to work after some time.

Now my second groan: The client itself.

The client, I'm sure you'll agree, is not the neatest. Maybe It's just me, or the fact that I use Linux, but the source was blatantly a dodgy patch of the Litecoin client, which was in turn a dodgy patch of the Bitminter Bitcoin client. It's not great. It doesn't respect many standard which are currently in Gtk, and it's not in any way user friendly. If we want Fastcoin to do a little bit more than be a reserve for niche hackers and programmers, it needs to be a little more usable.

I'm not the best programmer by a long way. But I know a fair bit of Vala (A cross-platform language that translates to C and then compiles, and is perfect for making Gtk applications), and I understand the basics of Gtk. If anyone is planning to make a proper client, I'd be more than happy to lend my limited skills when I get some free time.

Despite all this, it's clear that Fastcoin is, internally, a massive improvement on Litecoin and other scrypt currencies. It's just a shame that it can't take better advantage of this, and take the world by storm. The twitter account is regularly active and promoting, which is great. But with a complete lack of Linux binaries on the website, an unhelpful client, no (at least nothing visible) bootstrap file, I'm afraid to say that it's never going to truly take off. I really want it to though.

Thanks for reading, I hope it encourages some parts of this community to do something about it

- Zesterer

Thank you Zesterer for your post,

You have articulated your point well, and we agree with you that work needs to be done to improve the Linux client.  Part of the challenge as you have already pointed out is the current lack of support for these tools.  It is with great hope and enthusiasm that support forums such as this one that allows you to voice these concerns that these issues will eventually get addressed.  Part of the problem our community faces is the stigma that we certainly do have the fastest crypto currency on the planet right now, but that does not change the fact that proper development takes time!  FastCoin does not necessarily equate to Fast on development ;-)

You have already made a tremendous contribution with your post and as we gather more attention to our coin the proper help will make itself available.  Currently we have two top notch developers here within the forum and we are confident that more will make themselves available over time.  You probably already visited the following post but if you have not please work with the Linux team here...

http://www.fastcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2.0

Don't be afraid to ask Shitscared or Coradan for support, they are here to help.  If they cannot help that is OK, not all of us have the answers right now, somtimes it is more important to ask the right question then to seek the answer.  We need to remind ourselves that we are only human and although our coin is impressively fast, we are still merely mortals on a keyboard ;-)

We need to also consider reaching out to other Alt Coin communities for support, perhaps Litecoin's forum may be a good place as well as Bitcointalk.org.  Together we can work to resolve these issues and we agree whole heartily that you have the right drive and approach, we just need to sometimes be a little patience like the Cheetah is in the grass before it is ready to pounce! 

Linux Clients can be a bigger challenge to support simply because of all the different flavors that exists out there.  Our suggestion would be to pick maybe the top 3 or 5 Distro's and focus developing a client for each, perhaps we start with the more popular ones first and work our way down.  Only a suggestion.

Our Twitter followers so far are one of the best in Social media right now within the Crypto Space, if we need to ask the community for support please let us know and we will get the word out via our Twitter account.

We look forward to your continued support and constructive contributions to this project, this is exactly the level of focus and enthusiasm we need to take this coin to the next level.

Truly

/BB

That would be Great Zesterer!

We look forward to your release!