Many Bitcoin developers are actually quite positive to the idea of alternative implementations; all they're saying is "be careful".
> Gavin wrote to me only days after the BitCoinJ release to tell me how happy he was to see an alternative implementation. Satoshi expressed very similar sentiments. Nobody is against alternative implementations.
> What some people, especially Satoshi, have said is that there’s an unusual amount of risk involved with reimplementing the full system and using that reimplementation to mine. Bitcoin is very complex and if you aren’t skilled and very thorough you are likely to diverge from its behavior in small, hard to detect ways. This can fork the chain and split the economy. It’s one of the few things that could instantly kill Bitcoin beyond legal harassment of its users.
- Mike Hearn 2011
> part of the solution is to encourage alternative implementations that make different trust/convenience tradeoffs than the reference implementation. There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes work on cross-implementation testing (the “testnet3″ blockchain contains hundreds of transaction validation test cases, for example), and new features are being added to the protocol to support alternative implementations
-Gavin Andresen, late 2012
If you're not mining, I personally would say it can only be good if you just follow the protocol spec and try to implement Bitcoin from there. If you fall off the main chain and it's not obviously your fault, then either the protocol spec was unclear and can get improved or the original client has a bug, in which case there are ways to carefully phase the bug out of existence with a patch.
Many Bitcoin developers are actually quite positive to the idea of alternative implementations; all they're saying is "be careful".
> Gavin wrote to me only days after the BitCoinJ release to tell me how happy he was to see an alternative implementation. Satoshi expressed very similar sentiments. Nobody is against alternative implementations. > What some people, especially Satoshi, have said is that there’s an unusual amount of risk involved with reimplementing the full system and using that reimplementation to mine. Bitcoin is very complex and if you aren’t skilled and very thorough you are likely to diverge from its behavior in small, hard to detect ways. This can fork the chain and split the economy. It’s one of the few things that could instantly kill Bitcoin beyond legal harassment of its users.
- Mike Hearn 2011
> part of the solution is to encourage alternative implementations that make different trust/convenience tradeoffs than the reference implementation. There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes work on cross-implementation testing (the “testnet3″ blockchain contains hundreds of transaction validation test cases, for example), and new features are being added to the protocol to support alternative implementations
-Gavin Andresen, late 2012
If you're not mining, I personally would say it can only be good if you just follow the protocol spec and try to implement Bitcoin from there. If you fall off the main chain and it's not obviously your fault, then either the protocol spec was unclear and can get improved or the original client has a bug, in which case there are ways to carefully phase the bug out of existence with a patch.