Bitcoin Forum

I am pledging a bitcoin bounty of 10 BTC for the development of a chrome extension that interface with a bitcoin wallet or create one.

It must do the following.

1. Automatic receive and confirmation.
2. Detect payment options on website.  A way to click "buy" and bitcoins are deducted.
3. Tell us how many bitcoins there are in the wallet.

It doesn't need to have bitcoin generation feature or any of that, just a very simple wallet management system built right in. Extra bonus points if wallets can access services like mybitcoin.

Pledges:

1. 10 BTC - kiba Paid.
2. 100 BTC - TTbit Paid.
3. 100 BTC -Bitcoinex
4. 40 BTC - sandos
5. 50 BTC - Blimmerhead Paid

300 BTC total.

1 and 3 shouldn't be a big problem here, just a few json-rpc calls afaik. but 2 needs either an official standard code inside the html files that can be recognized by the addon or something like a database with all bitcoin accepting pages that have to be updated every now and then.

I don't know how to make Chrome extensions, just wanted to say something ontopic.

Yes. I pledge 100 coins. I'll pledge more with interest.

I use firefox, but chrome seems to be gaining ground.

I think its need to do this for any browser. and then the appropriate html code will become as standard.

100 BTC from me for chrome or firefox extension

I already thought about this problem. I came up with this idea:

Have bitcoin (or some proxy program (I was thinking about this for my pybitcoind-desklet program) in between) start a dbus daemon that accepts "bills". These "bills" list the receiver address, the amount of bitcoins, the program sending the "bill" and possibly a transaction description. On receiving the receipt, the user gets a pop-up/notification about the "bill" to pay it and the user is free to accept or decline the bill. After that the money is send or not.

Via this, possibly every program has a standard interface to connect to for sending bitcoins and there is no direct connection to the rpc interface, so malicious programs can't do any harm (e.g. sending rpc commands that it isn't allowed to do.

Interested in creating a MicroFormat (http://microformats.org/) for BitCoin payment options?

Why not just have an 'insert bitcoin address' button? Definitely not a long term solution, but it would hold for short term use!

I'll pledge 40 btc.

Put me down for 50BTC.

This is a good idea.  Maybe I need to do a bounty for my Facebook developer store plug-in idea.

Thanks for increasing the bounty to 300 BTC.

Ok, so I have about 80% of this working in Chrome. It just needs fleshed out and polished up a bit and most of the code should translate nicely to Firefox. I'm just not entirely sure what you mean by:

1. Automatic receive and confirmation.

Some sort of alert when you receive a payment?

Well, I wasn't thinking clearly at that time. I think it would be useful if you got notified automatically incoming payment, instead of your wallet's balance silently increase. It helps if you know where you got it from.

Ok. The API doesn't currently seem to support much info on individual received payments. I could set up a timer to periodically check the balance and report differences, but your best readout will be in Bitcoin itself. Otherwise I guess you'd have to use a different address for each received payment. I may have to think about it a bit while I finish the rest of this stuff.

As for automatic detection of payment options, I think I'm going to start with having to select the text of a Bitcoin address, then right clicking and choosing "Send Bitcoins...". It will check to see if what you selected appears to be a valid address and then give you a box to enter an amount to send. After the first version I'll go back over and see if I can perfect some of the functionality. I just want something to start using.

Is the code open source?

Sure.

May be make plugin who parses page and search valid bitcoin addresses, and where will it doing the "pay" buttion? Address search can be done quickly - addres is a certain length and starts from "1" symbol.

Or so it will be?

Do you have a repository that we can look at?

And it need to enable JSON for bitcoin (GUI client)
I wonder, is this possible?

Then would client in the tray, and the user could pay on sites with one click.

The need for a bitcoin GUI client negate the benefit of a chrome extension. The objective is to lower the barrier of getting into bitcoin, not increase it.

No repository. Just a folder with a handful of files. I'm close to having something somewhat presentable. Then I'll release it and post a zip of the sources.

I think that those people who can use bitcoind barriers will not notice, but others more comfortable with a GUI bitcoin

I think most users won't really bother with generating coins, an extension that interfaces a i-keep-your-bitcoins-safe-and-available-from-anywhere would be something pretty easy for newcomers to get a hold of, wouldn't it ?

The ideas of having to install two software package is a barrier.

In the future I imagine someone designing cool looking bitcoin GUIs and advertising "Now you can keep bitcoins on YOUR OWN computer!" and people will be like "Oh, how does that work..." lol.

Oh, and then people will move their coins off of the wallets and find out they were all fractional reserving it up.

Ok, posting a handful of screenshots here. I'm going to run through a couple more tests and then put it up on google and post the link in here. I'd like to take some time and tidy up the code a bit, but if everyone's that desperate to look at it, I'll give you what I've got. Functionality is fairly basic at this point, but here's what it does:

- Makes a Bitcoin Icon in the browser you can click to check your balance.
- You will need to right-click that Icon and go to options to set it up.
- Allows you to hilight the text of a bitcoin address and right-click to choose a "Send Bitcoins" option, which opens a notification and lets you enter an amount to send.
- The same "Send Bitcoins" option shows up when you right-click an image. This works a little different. If someone sets up a payment button using a graphic that says something like "Buy Now for 100 BTC!", they can set it up to work with the extension by loading the graphic like this:


Placing the amount before the | and the address after. The amount can be left blank, but you have to include the | before the address. The amount will then automatically get filled in as seen in screenshot 1.

You have to have Bitcoin running and in -server mode (which means setting up the RPC user and password options in bitcoin.conf). And don't forget to set the extension options or the other functions won't work. I've only tested this on two XP machines running Chrome 7 and Bitcoin 0.3.14 and one of them I had to specify the rpc login credentials on the command line for some reason.

That's about the gist of it. Pretty basic so far, but it should be expandable to include things like:
- SSL
- Generate and paste a new receive address
- Periodically check balance and alert changes
- mybitcoin.com interface
- Use mtgox.com data to show balance in USD

I'll post back later with the google URL to install it.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hhbhfoohbnjkdcndbhjlicijccioklea (https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hhbhfoohbnjkdcndbhjlicijccioklea)

What I have in mind doesn't require the use of a bitcoin daemon. It should be self-contained as a bitcoin client.

Simplicity is the driving goal here. It should be so easy that grandmas can use it.

Sorry that I didn't emphasize it strongly enough. So I will pay once the chrome extension is available for installation or it is available as source code. I will pledge more bitcoins for the development of a self-contained browser extension for bitcoin.

I actually sort of gathered that from some of your last few posts in this thread. What I've done is still fairly useful even if it doesn't meet your requirements. A stand-alone client in the form of a browser extension is a tad more complicated. The best way I can think to do it would be to interface with something like mybitcoin.com, which I'll look into. I just don't have the resources to host that end of it. You don't owe me a bounty, at least until I deliver on that.

Would you mind helping me test this extension? I just learned how to build them yesterday, so this one is a big step toward stuff like you're looking for.

I wouldn't mind testing it.

I'll update my above post to include this as well.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hhbhfoohbnjkdcndbhjlicijccioklea (https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hhbhfoohbnjkdcndbhjlicijccioklea)

I highlighted a bitcoin address and click on send bitcoin but nothing happens.

The balance of my bitcoin wallet shows though.

Does your balance show up when you click the Bitcoin browser button?
Make sure you're right-clicking after hilighting.
You may also need to reload the page the address is on if you had it opened before you installed.

No, it does not send bitcoins for me too. Chrome 8. :(

This is a dirty hack, although this does not seem as it. It will ruin the caching of images, at least.

I suggest use a new tag:

<bitcoin amount="100" address="17v4AR81oFJLAG8jHDKJKNKjSvY2QAmf1V">
<img src="100BTC.png">
</bitcoin>

or

<bitcoin amount="100" address="17v4AR81oFJLAG8jHDKJKNKjSvY2QAmf1V"/>

for built-in into plugin "pay" buttion

You suggested a new tag. So W3C should add it to the HTML5 standard immediately! ;D

Browsers ignore tags which are unknown. If they did not do this  to give an error then the new versions of html never began to be used.

Bitcoin Extension Options
JSON-RPC Server: http://
Username:
Password:


The plugin can read files in the user's system? I would like to avoid entering any password entering and addresses

Anyway, I think that using some URI (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55.msg12988#msg12988) is preferable than slow HTML parsing. :-\

To give it (or to exploit (https://web.archive.org/web/2010/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploit_(computer_security))) an opportunity to steal a wallet.dat file? :-\

Why? Network connection, name and password is already enough to steal money by bitcoin transaction.

Ideally it would not give the name and password to plugin. Plugin can ask GUI client by JSON for payment dialog. The client could show a window with the amount and address, which would be passed from plugin by JSON.

For now the client have no ability to show the send window after JSON-RPC request. I guess it shouldn't have such an option at all because JSON-RPC is for silent operations by design. To prevent exploits and malicious operations the code of the extension should be reviewed before installing or updating. The problem is that chrome extensions update silently if no additional permissions were requested since the last update. At least (most of) the extensions are written on javascript so they are open source by definition. Well, they may be obfuscated and packed though.

HTML 5 defines 'data attributes' for this use:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/elements.html#embedding-custom-non-visible-data-with-the-data-*-attributes

So this could be:

<img src='foo.png' data-amount="100" data-address="17v4AR81oFJLAG8jHDKJKNKjSvY2QAmf1V">

This has the advantage of validating with HTML 5 validators.

Thanks for your comments, everyone. I'll try to respond to most of them here...

I guess I didn't read this thoroughly the first time. You might need to turn on notifications. I know this can be annoying, but it is a first test version.


Yes, it is pretty dirty. It was the easiest thing I could think of that I can access with javascript the way Chrome processes the dialog menu click. I'll have to mess around and see if it's even possible to access something like the address= parameter you suggest.



Yes, but it is limited by Chrome. It's for storing options specific to the extension. If you want to avoid entering a password, you can't exactly use the JSON-RPC. If you want it to use a service like mybitcoin.com, you will have to enter a password and a captcha every time you do something. Any time you enter input it could be stored or forwarded to a dozen other sites and you'd never know. I do intend to open up the source, though.

I'm going to make some updates and see if I can fix the send dialog so it doesn't have to use notifications. Then I'll post the source, ugly as it is.

How do I turn on notification?

Hmmm, should be:

(Wrench) -> Options -> Under the Hood -> Content Settings -> Notifications

I think they're enabled by default though, so that might not be the problem.

No effect.

related: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55.0;all URI-scheme for bitcoin

Hmm, ok. Try right-clicking the little pumpkin picture beside my post and see if you get anything when you click the Send Bitcoins option from there (I set it up as previously described). In the mean time, I'll looking back through the code to see if I can find what went wrong. If you're up for it, I might send you the code to load raw and see if you can get debut info when it fails for you.

Edit: Also check what happens (if anything) when you select some text other than a bitcoin address and choose Send Bitcoins.

Double no such luck.

Ok. I'll switch it to open a new tab or window and see if we can get it to work that way. Might be a day or two. Things got busy.

I've updated the extension so it doesn't use notifications anymore. Instead, it creates its own little box in the upper right of your browser tab. Please let me know if this works for you or not, or if you encounter any odd behaviors.

Error validating address string.

Well I'll consider it a step in the right direction. Are you still getting your balance when you click the icon? If not, are your options still set after the upgrade?

Oh, I forgot! Didn't start my bitcoin daemon. Will do and test again.

No luck, anyway.

What OS / Chrome version are you using?

Archlinux distro. Chrome version 6.0.472.62.

So both OS and version could be a factor. I'll try and see if I'm using some new or experimental feature.

Hey! Amazing work on the Chrome extension. I just tried it:

It works from this forum but not from the (secured) Chrome extensions page - from where I downloaded it.
If I click on a *bad* address there, it does give the usual error message but a valid address (ie yours) shows nothing. Odd.
It sends fine from this forum though. (enjoy your Bitcoin btw - don't spend it all at once)

Ubuntu Meerkat, Chrome 8.0.552.18 dev

Thanks for the feedback. Glad it's working. I just added explicit access to https, but the address on the extensions page still won't work because Chrome recognizes the extensions gallery and won't run scripts on it, so I've taken my address off of there.

This certainly works well enough for powerusers, and I (almost) sent 40 btc.

It would be much nicer if it was possible to automatically detect BTC addresses and mark them somehow, instead of having to select them.

Incredibly bad idea, as suggested above microformats is the way to go, since it's standard compliant XHTML 1.0 strict and it is easy to process.

I've been thinking about this. Since it's not part of a tag, it would require parsing all the text on a page. And since there's nothing really overt to identify a bitcoin address as such, that means checking every word on the page for length, and then sending it to Bitcoin for verification, which can get pretty ugly. Still, it might be worth trying just to see how it performs.

I'm liking the data- attributes idea for images. I'll have to take a closer look at that.

Addresses have a convenient format for parsing. They always begin with the number "1" and have a length of at least n and no more than m.

Following the discovery of such strings that looks like addresses you can check it on the client,  this option recently added to it.

Ok, next version is up. It will attempt to convert Bitcoin addresses to links which bring up the send box when clicked. It has some limitations and can still get confused, but it should work in most cases. You can still do the double-click to hi-light and right-click to send method in places where it fails.

I'm working on getting ahold of some online wallet services to see about integrating them for a no-client-needed option. Though, unless they can also provide address verification, you'd still need the client to convert addresses to links and whatnot.

It doesn't convert anything for me and I still can't send bitcoins.

Is upgrading Chrome a possibility for you?

Just tried it but no highlights showing for me either...

Ubuntu Meerkat + Chrome 8.0.552.18 dev

Thanks. I'll check it out in linux tomorrow.

I could.

However, you gottach realize that the usefulness of the extension also depend in part how well it work on the stable version.

Agreed. Chrome 7 is latest stable version.

And my system just happen to update to 7.0.517.43.

Excellent. I'll let you know if I come up with anything on the linux front today.

Ok, I tried this out on a debian box. At first I was getting my balance, so I was connecting to Bitcoin properly, but my attempts at sending coins all resulted in the "Error validating address string." The linux box was running Bitcoin 0.3.13 so I upgraded to 0.3.14, which is apparently the version that added the address validation. Now it works fine. However, the first time I clicked one of the links it created a box came up about loading an external link handler in which I chose 'Do nothing' and checked the box to make it permanent for that link type. This was because I formatted the links href as bitcoin:?addr= which can be changed or eliminated since it's not really used. So I suppose my next question is what version of Bitcoin are you using?

Thanks :). I am using a regex, but mine isn't quite as specific. Care if I swipe it?

Valid addresses can be 25-34 characters in length, though the smaller ones are very rare.

Testnet addresses can be 35 characters long, and they don't always start with a 1.

Is this project dead or alive?

It's alive. I just haven't worked on it in a few days. Did you get my question about what version of Bitcoin you're running?

Mine is 0.13.3 beta.

Ok, I guess the address validation part of the JSON-RPC was added in 0.3.14, so that's probably why it's not working for you.

Congratulation. My part for the bounty paid.

Thanks. When I get some time I'll work on interfacing directly with Mt.Gox and/or MyBitcoin.

I pledged 100btc, is there an extension I can download and pay?

It's in his signature link.

Also, it would be nice put your address out there for people to pay you via extension.

I'm getting "Error validating address string" when I try to send. I have 3.14

Did you start the bitcoin daemon?

Oh, no. I need to download that separately and just turn it on?

I think it came with bitcoin.

You  have to set the rpcuser and rpcpassword options in bitcoin.conf, which you may have to create (same directory as the wallet.dat). Then you have to start Bitcoin with the -server switch or in daemon mode. You also have to set the extension options accordingly by right-clicking the bitcoin icon in Chrome and choosing Options.

I made the bitocin.conf in the right place, and started it with -server and it tells me I need to make bitcoin.conf with rpcpassword=<password> I did that both with the "<" and without. It also told me to make it owner read only, and I don't know if I did that successfully or not, is that important? Is there a simple way to get it right?

Without knowing what exactly you put into your file, I don't know how to help you.

rpcpassword=<extpass>

is the entire contents of the file. I also tried:

rpcpassword=extpass

Is this a windows machine? I ran into this on one running XP and nothing I did with the file seemed to satisfy it. I did get it to work by specifying them on the command line:

bitcoin -server -rpcuser=mylogin -rpcpassword=mypass

The file worked perfectly on a different XP machine, so I'm not sure what the issue is. Until now I just thought I was crazy  ;D

It worked! I sent you 5BTC using it.

I'm using windows 7.

The third time I used it the text was all white. I'm highlighting the addy at the bottom of bitcoinwatch, so you can test and see if it's just me or not.

By white I mean invisible, but there since I can highlight it.

Well that's interesting. I'm getting it, too. It must be inheriting a style sheet from the bitcoinwatch page. Should be fixable.

Now, you shouldn't have to highlight that address. It should be a link that you can click to open the send box. It doesn't catch every address yet because of how the surrounding HTML works in certain cases, but it should get most of them and that particular one is working on my end. Are you not getting links at all?

Nope, no links. Just the "send bitcoins" when I right click.

edit: oddly, I get some links now. I didn't change anything. Your address on this page is not linking, but bitcoin watch is now. And some other forum signature addresses are now too.

Can someone do this sort of stuff using a greasemonkey script for firefox or is that not possible?


I would consider starting a bounty for that if it can.

Yeah, I'm getting the same thing. Weird. The signatures usually all work for me. I've got a few tweaks in my head that might help the success rate of recognizing addresses.



I was planning on porting this over to a Firefox extension at some point. Most of the code should work just about as-is, but the structure is a lot different, from what I understand. I've never worked with Firefox/greasemonkey.

Your addy is linking up now. Is it learning? :-)

No, if you go back a page in this topic, it's not working there. Kinda wacky. I have some ideas as to what's causing it, but I'm not sure exactly why yet.

But then they have to install a greasemonkey extension, not a bitcoin extension. Plus, can greasemonkey access stuff outside firefox?

I haven't been able to play with it yet, but I shipped my 100btc bounty. Good work.

Please mark me as paid.

Done.

Version 1.3 - Friday, October 29, 2010

This is actual version?

Not sure what you mean. It is the most recent release.

Many Germanic languages use one word for the two English words "actual" and "current", and their dictionaries tend to translate this word into "actual".

So when non-English speakers ask about an "actual version" of software, they invariably mean the "current version".

I've just paid my portion of the bounty 50 BTC, please mark me off.

I would have paid earlier but because this forum has no working subscription function it's a little tricky to keep track of all the threads I'm watching.  I wish the admins would do something about this.

Yes, you understand me correctly.

Then I'm next who could not run the plugin.


I filled out correctly username, password, port. But when pressed a BTC coin on the tray inside browser, nothing happens. When I'm stopping the bitcoind plugin shows popup "Error fetching wallet data."

Done.

Ok, can you tell me what operating system, Bitcoin version, and Chrome version you are running? Any other information about your setup might help, too. Are you running on a non-standard port? Are Bitcoin and Chrome running on the same computer?

This is very helpful :) Thank you. I love learning new things.

Debian GNU/LInux, bitcoin 0.3.14, google chrome 7.0.517.41
port 8333
yes, on same computer

because the error "Error fetching wallet data." occurs after stopping the demon then I think communication with the plugin is established.

Port 8333 should be the P2P port. The RPC interface listens on 8332 locally (127.0.0.1). If you changed that in the extension options, try changing it back. What you are describing sounds like it is connecting to something, but either authentication fails or it's not getting a response it recognizes.

Yes, theese been problem with port number, sorry.

Maybe do the checking by running some command like getinfo and if it did not work show a more verbose error?

Searching for addresses on the page will be implemented?

There are still some situations where it doesn't show an error. I'm fixing them as I find them. It should be finding addresses on the page as long as it's connecting to Bitcoin. They should show up as links. It's not finding them all though, so I'm still working on that.

So...how is development going?

It's still going. I haven't had as much time to work on it lately. I've tweaked a few things but nothing big enough to make a new release. I'm also working with Mt.Gox to build a clientless version that may also support trading.

Can you clarify  what a clientless version mean? What this talk of trading?

Clientless as in you don't need Bitcoin running on your own computer (though I guess it's not really the client part we're using here). You'll be able to access your Mt.Gox wallet. As for trading, if I go that far, you'll be able to buy more bitcoins from the extension, or convert them back to Mt.Gox dollars. You'll also be able to see a simplified version of the current market data.

Just want to thank you for this little useful extension. Keep up the good work and take these 50 BTC as an incentive. ^_^

thanks, it works. Donated 5 btc

Progress update?

No progress report?

Working out some bugs in using SSL. Very short on time lately.

Is the source code available anywhere? I would like to put it on github.

Bitcoinex and sandos, where are you?

I'm here. I sent 100 BTC to Bitquux's 17v4AR81oFJLAG8jHDKJKNKjSvY2QAmf1V

PMed Sandos.

Oh, I sent ~37 btc quite a while ago.

My wallet is empty at the moment after "difficulties" at getting liberty reserve.

Very well, 3 BTC is left.

But when will be added automatically search for addresses on the page?

This is no good! We can't continue where bitquux left off.

My PM to bitquux had been met with silence. His excuse for not releasing the source code is because it's not working in the last PM that he sent to me.

Frak this!  >:( I don't give a damn about if it doesn't work or not. This is stuff that bitcoiners(at least those who are the pledgers) paid for.

Now we're stuck with a codebase that we can't pay someone else to improve or fix up.


/me is boiling mad.

I believe all Chrome Extensions are open source, if you know where to look :)  On my Mac, I see the Bitcoin extension source code in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions/hhbhfoohbnjkdcndbhjlicijccioklea/1.3_0

I assume someone could package that up and release it as their own.  Copyright legalities notwithstanding.

We're fucked if we can't legally package it as an open source project. People's money are wasted.  :'(

/me is still mighty pissed off.

I'm no lawyer, but if you paid the bills, I'm pretty sure the code is yours.

We didn't sign any formal contract wtih Bitquux.

Well. I opened "my" part of the plugin code and give it in the public domain!

:)

I don't have another room for a project, but I am going to pledge 20 BTC for a competitor to Mr. Don'tReleaseCode aka bitquux.
/me is still mad.

Good grief. I can't live and breathe this stuff like the rest of you can. So here's the code for the most recent release. I've got a Mt. Gox enabled version mostly done now and will post it once I finish and get rid of some useless, confusing (and commented out) stuff. As far as the code goes, the Mt. Gox stuff won't significantly affect anything you're seeing in this version of the source. The code is pretty basic and horribly uncommented, but the concept is there. It would be nice if someone would like to look at the address recognition stuff and come up with something more consistent. I'm thinking of using pure regex and not messing with the validation through the RPC so it will work better with Mt.Gox. If the address is invalid, it will fail during send. The code is public domain / free as in do whatever you want with it and do or don't give me credit. I appreciate and will include any good fixes and submissions, or you can spin off your own version because you're still pissed at me.

I am pissed because you said that the project will be open source, then you failed to reply to my inquiry via PM. Of course, it was also my fault that I didn't request that this project to be open source and viewable on a public repository in the first post on this subject. If that was put into place, I wouldn't worry about much of anything. There wouldn't be so much anger if I take simple precaution like this.

The only good reason right now is that we would spin off is that you are a bottleneck to the development process. If we have to wait for you to integrate all the changes that were happening, you are a liability.

Of course, there's still one thing that I like you to do, put your public domain declaration in COPYING in your source code. You could use something like http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/ to make sure that it is somewhat foolproof than your public domain declaration on the forum.

Once that is done, I'll simply take it and put it on a public repository somewhere. Development of open source projects like this should be done in public anyway.

That being said, communication IS VERY IMPORTANT. Failing to reply to PM when you logged on to the forum inspire a serious lack of confidence.

I like it. It's been added to the newly attached zip.

Thank you.