Bitcoin Forum

I don't want to call devs out, just can't wait for it :)

and,

what is going on with multisignature txs ?

I would also like to know the answer to this question.

I suppose when it's ready

This seems like the most likely answer.

A release candidate 0.8-rc1 will be "real soon now."

We especially need Windows testers.  See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=129861.0

The more Windows testers we can get, the sooner 0.8 is released.

Please help!  Even an "it works for me" report is great.  Test the basics -- sending and receiving money -- or more exhaustive tests if you are motivated.

Multi-signature transactions open up a class of different features. They're supported today at the protocol level.

Probably what you are really interested in is two-factor coins, or perhaps the ability to have multiple owners for corporate/institutional accounts, things like that?

a way to actually lock coins in wallet with 2 different passwords coming from 2 different input devices

some functionality like yubikey brings to mtgox account

I started working through a GUI design for secure multi-device wallets a couple months ago:
  https://moqups.com/gavinandresen/no8mzUDB/p:afbbfb850

But to be secure, I think we need the payment protocol (https://gist.github.com/4120476) first, because otherwise an attacker can simply replace the bitcoin address given to the first device and trick you into paying them.

I personally have no idea how to execute a multi-signature transaction today. Maybe all I need is a tutorial.

You can look at some RPCs on bitcoind, or write a bitcoinj program to do it. If that's beyond the level at which you're comfortable then yes, it's not quite ready yet.

We know it's frustrating to wait for these features. But currently almost all development work goes onto "boring but necessary" things like performance, security, basic professionalism (like code signing, unit tests, etc).

For 2-factor coins, the first step is indeed the payment protocol. Once that's done it'll benefit the Trezor project too, which I think may end up being a superior solution to 2-factor wallets for keen/power users, and will certainly be finished first. 2-factor coins will end up being a half-way point between "single factor wallet on your PC" and "single-factor dedicated hardware wallet".

Because the payment protocol work benefits both projects, and isn't currently making much progress as Gavin is busy, any effort expended there helps everyone. There's a TODO list here:

https://github.com/gavinandresen/paymentrequest/blob/master/TODO.txt

so if you have some programming ability, why not help out.

The backbone is all there, but there's no friendly GUI, and you have to use the "raw" transactions, which require understanding quite a bit more about the internals of Bitcoin than you usually need to understand to just make a payment. In particular, you need to figure out which transactions you want to spend, and make sure that you spend as outputs all that you intend to spend since anything you don't spend is taken as a transaction fee. You need to either use the command line (using bitcoind and have the JSON-RPC server set up in your bitcoin.conf) or use the "Debug console" in the Help menu of Bitcoin-Qt.

Information on raw transactions: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Raw_Transactions
Here's an example of a 2-of-2 signature setup on testnet: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/escrowexample.txt
Some notes from Gavin: https://gist.github.com/3161162
An example of a 2-of-3 transaction: https://gist.github.com/3966071

So there's some stuff scattered about, but I don't think an easy "here's how to do multisig tutorial" that I've seen. I've played around with it quite a bit on testnet, so I think I have a pretty good handle on it. Maybe if I get a chance I'll write something up. But I probably won't get a chance for quite a while.