Blockcast is incredibly easy to use!

All of the abstractions related to signing transactions and messages are handled by a wallet that adheres to the Common Wallet standard.

There is a Common Wallet adapter for the Bitcoin-QT/bitcoind JSON-RPC as well as a simple javascript native wallet that we mainly use for testing.

https://github.com/blockai/rpc-common-wallet https://github.com/blockai/test-common-wallet

Everything related to reading from and propagating to the blockchain are handled by any number of different Common Blockchain adapters. In theory they should all behave in exactly the same manner.

As well as supporting the JSON-RPC interface, there are a bunch of unofficial Common Blockchain adapters for services like Blockcypher and Chain.

https://github.com/blockai/rpc-common-blockchain https://github.com/andrewmalta13/blockcypher-unoffical https://github.com/andrewmalta13/chain-unofficial

You could be creating applications that are reading and writing from the blockchain without much hassle at all!

Depends on how much data you're trying to add to the blockchain. If its small enough to fit inside of a single OP_RETURN transaction, Bitcoin might be enough. Anything larger than that and Ethereum is a clear winner.

Another important thing to remember is that Bitcoin has a block time of 10 minutes. That means that once your user submits data to the blockchain, they need to wait ~5 minutes for even 1 confirmation.

Ethereum has a block time of 12 seconds.

Not necessarily. Miners who mine ethereum are mining for idealogical reasons, and lose money to do so. As the cost to support this mining increase (in part due to the size of the Ethereum chain) it's reasonable that they will stop mining (thus bringing security to the potato), and/or prune the blockchain and stop hosting for free.

As for the 12 second block time, that's a bug not a feature. If you don't know why, you should spend some time looking into it.

I did a quick google but didn't find anything. Mind giving me a link or at least a summary?

Here's a start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0fHpQV9wHo

tldr: longer reorgs and less energy mean less security. Which, is presumably the reason to even use a blockchain

A response from Vitalik with actual numbers https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/38jiyv/are_ethere...

> Okay, fine, under normal conditions bitcoin blocks are 98% likely to be final but ethereum blocks are 80% likely to be final. However, six bitcoin blocks provide a one minus one in a billion finality guarantee (since 0.02 6 < 10-9) and 13 ethereum blocks provide that same guarantee (0.2 13 < 10-9), so it's still the case that what bitcoin provides in 60 minutes, ethereum provides in 156 seconds. Sure, not in six blocks, but it's a battle of linear versus exponential, so the more fine-grained you can make the single-block confirmation time the better.

There are also uncle rewards which mitigate the miner incentives.

I see benefits to both systems and longer block times are clearly more efficient, but since Ethereum is an application platform a 10 minute block time is untenable. It may be less efficient, but I don't think thats a nail in the coffin.