Bitcoin Forum

http://www.bitpak.com/  shows a pretty nice video demo of a Bitcoin client that they say will be in the iOS app store soon.

If it gets in, will this be the first actual wallet for non-jailbroken iPhones?

Anyone heard anything about bitpak or know who is behind it? (1st I've seen of them)
Their site says: "BitPak is a project of Ominous Megacorp."  http://www.ominousmegacorp.com

hmm..  'interesting' marketing considering the trust issues that we've had in the bitcoin community in recent months.
I hope that despite the name they'll come out and be a bit more 'open' than just 'ominous' ;)

Hi.

I'm Rob Sama, the guy behind BitPak and Ominous Megacorp. The 'Ominous' name is a bit of a joke, as the company is basically just me and some developers.  I hope the name isn't too much of a put off.

We just submitted to the app store yesterday. So it will take some time before they approve or I fight with apple over it. I felt it was important to have a native iPhone client, so I went ahead and designed the app and recruited some developers to build it. As built, the app certainly isn't perfect. It takes forever to download the blocks, though it's speedy once they're downloaded. We're workiing on using an online database instead of downloading blocks for version 2.

I'm surprised this was discovered so quickly. Hopefully people will appreciate what went into making this. In the meantime, please visit my other website, www.bitcoindecals.com and get yourself a bitcoin bumper sticker ;-)

Thanks,

-Rob

liked the app and the vid music, can you improve the blocks downloading in the future if is really too slow ? i like that option before depending on a central server, thanks

Looks promising, but what makes this different than the other apps that have been denied?  Why don't you include a partially downloaded block chain in the app instead of having the users download the whole thing?  I don't think you have to download the whole block chain anyway, the multibit guys have a very fast way of handling it, something about headers and only looking for the keys you have, it's a bit over my head but might be worth looking into https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43616.0

EDIT: I see, server handles block chain, like BitcoinSpinner - good thing I don't program, I'd screw everything up.

Best of luck on getting it approved. Apple and their walled garden has been pretty hard on the bitcoin crowd. A bitcoin client on the Apple app store would be huge.

Is it a full client, or just an api interface? It looks more like a mtgox client than anything else :-\

in either case, here are a few suggestions  :D

• when entering numbers, the keyboard layout should be numerical, for easier typing
• each field needs to be bigger for easier reading and selecting
• less dependence on mtgox. there are other exchanges you know...
• instead of a popup with "ok", replace "payment sent" with a popup that automatically closes (like the installous ones)
• a button to paste address, or better yet, integration with ios, so you can select and send from anywhere (not sure if possible though)
• notification center alerts for received coins, instead of "ok" popups

I second this one.

Same goes for this one.

It didn't look very dependent on MtGox.  It is a fully featured wallet from what I can tell, but it does show the curent exchange rates on MtGox.

I disagree with this one.  What if you decided to set down your phone?

As an iOS developer, I can assure you Apple would not allow integration as you might picture it.  It would be possible to do it through the use of a custom URL scheme, which I am sure the developers are familiar with.  Bassically, you would have to use links formated something similar to "bitpak://openaddress//", so it would be app-specific.

Notifications are handled separately depending on whether or not the app is currently on-screen.  If it isn't, I'm sure it would apear as a push notification in notification center.

Those are just my thoughts.

BitPak just got approved in the app store.  You can get your copy of it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bitpak/id489248095?mt=8&ls=1

EDIT: moved to other thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55441.0

awsome, cant wait to try it.

I think this is great, and a good step.

Turning on a few of my iphone friends to this..

Why wasn't this denied? I'm glad it wasn't but I'm surprised given the number of other people who said they were denied.

So this is the full node? Cool~~  ;D

Awesome! Now we know that bitcoin clients _can_ be approved.

However I'm not very fond of mobile clients which download the full block chain. Electrum-style thin client would be the best solution IMHO.

yeah, then use server-centric clients and leave the p2p for real supporters

I was just leaving a tip to the original developer - just implement same kind of bitcoin client, but with Electrum concept (private keys stored on the client/dropbox, balance received from the server, no block chain download). This kind of wallet app could be hugely popular, since it would be really fast. Just look at BitcoinSpinner as an example.

Full block chain mobile clients won't become popular, because downloading the block chain is pain in the ass. Just my two bitcents.

I agree

if you only have an iphone around and you have been waiting a long time for a native wallet then it's easy for me to note that you don't really know how a thin client works. I actually have both, iphone and android, around so i've been using the bitcoin app with android for quite some time, few months. I can say it's awesome fast downloading blocks, a month for example downloads in 5-10 seconds, easy to work with and doesn't depend on any central server either.
I only hope iphone will get equal or better user experience with this app or future ones because we need to get bitcoin mobile by any means.

But it's so much wasted disk space.  I have my phone full of music and movies and am not interested in an app that will constantly grow.

tell me if you really note 10-15Mb a year in a 8Gb storage space of a cheap iphone. Can't really speculate what the storage space will be in 100 years but i know for sure bitcoin blockchain Merkle-tree compressed will be 100-150Mb  ::)
Satoshi did think about storage space requirements and had a few words on it in the original paper.

Btw we got a nice Christmas gift for our phones, hope they keep up the good work

Well for me this app is a step backwards from a free QR scanner and free instawallet account. No downloading, transactions show quickly, and no Dropbox required. And they actually work on my phone, unlike this app which crashes immediately.

This app looks sexy but it's pretty much unusable, I left it a couple of nights on foreground and wifi and the block chain DL is still around ~40% slowly eating more and more of my not-so-plentiful space.

I think light clients (server based) will be far more successful. I don't think the fact that the client can hold private keys will be of great relevance since I think most bitcoin payments in the future won't even hit the bitcoin network.

It's an awesome PoC but a really bad wallet so far.
Looked promising... but no.

Um. Holding the private keys is one of the most important things in my mind.  This means that you don't have trust whatever server you are using to not steal your coins and it also means that if said server goes offline, you can still access your coins.

Tested this with a friend last night and I think a couple of things could be improved.

1) The QR code it generates to receive add additional text that break compatibility when using it to receive money from other mobile wallet apps. I'm not sure if this was what allowed them to get the app approved but I don't see any real benefit to making it harder to do a transfer.  I had to paste the address in a note and remove the extra junk so i could past it in BitcoinSpinner or Bitcoin Wallet.

2) The app requires that you have a dropbox account. Not a deal-breaker but added an unnecessary step. A nag would have been sufficient.

I can't speak to the big block chain download but will post more if I hear anything about it.

So.... what happens when you change phones?

Did something happen to the approval?  I just looked for it in the app store and it didn't show up.  It says "Did you mean hitpad?"

Hey Rob,

will the new version actually function? The last one I bought said: "downloading blockchain 0%" for weeks.