Here at the Bitcoin Grant, we would like to jump start this development with a financial incentive and initiate an ongoing conversation on how we can work together towards developing a smarter, more efficient system of tomorrow, today.

Up for grabs: 500 bitcoins or $500,000; whichever is greater.

Taking on a project of this scope is a highly intensive, technical undertaking and we believe excellent developers should be compensated as such, especially when it comes to open source projects.

One of the main goals will be to separate the wallet from the node, as we have already done with mining. This way, the wallet, which will only hold private keys and create transactions, would pass transactions directly to a relay node, based on the bloom filter. Meanwhile, the block node will maintain the block chain and validate and relay new blocks.

Such developments would significantly strengthen the system. Modularization would make cancer attacks less likely and increase the node count, which, currently, is fairly low.

This is by no means is a feature request, merely ideas as to initiate a discussion. We welcome any feedback or suggestions. And of course, let us know if you would like to contribute to this project by submiting a grant proposal.

http://bitcoingrant.org