If anyone's checked out the bitcoin source and tried to compile it, you might notice that it is... well, kind of bloated. By my standards anyway. It requires huge numbers of gigantic libraries and so forth. Way more than what it actually does. All you really need are some TCP/IP, database, and crypto algorithms.

In fact, unless I'm missing something major, seems like we're really just talking about a glorified IRC bot with some security features... Does anyone else get the impression that Bitcoin's current back end is over-complicated? Also, does this argue in favor of writing (or anticipating someone writing) a cleaner/smaller version?