The 30 minutes isn't to for "collection", it's for announcement checking.  If there's a hard fork and people are potentially going to lose money, we need users to be aware as soon as possible.

Guys, calm down.  

The code you posted doesn't send your username to bitcoinarmory.com, it sends the truncated hash of your user home directory path.  This does not give us any information about you except that it will be the same when your system makes multiple requests for version/announcement information.   We intentionally chose this instead of tracking by IP because we knew that IP logging was "not cool".  And in the end, we don't care about your IP, we only use it the ID for collecting statistics about what operatings systems are being use to run Armory and what versions people are using, especially after announcing new versions.  This helps us remove duplicates.

Armory (the company) only tracks unique IDs long enough to collect daily statistics of our user base, like how many people have upgraded.  If a announce-request is made and comes from an ID we have never seen, we add the OS and Armory version to the statistics.  Otherwise we ignore it.   That's it.  We added the unique ID so that we have a way to count unique users without logging IP addresses.    We also add the ability for you disable this by running with "--skip-annuonce-check".  

As a company, we have to have some way to measure our userbase, and we felt this was the least intrusive way possible.  And you can opt-out.

Calling it (replacing "<youruser>" with your username, of course) is redundant.  That's the default location.  If you run Armory without specifying --satoshi-datadir, it will automatically use /home/<user>/.bitcoin.  You only need to use --satoshi-datadir if you normally run bitcoin-qt/bitcoind with a non-standard "-datadir".  If not, you don't need to use that arg (unless your $HOME variable is not set to /home/<user>)

If you want to donate to OpenSSL or Tor, we'll be happy to match!  Part of the issue is that they refused to get us a persistent donation address, so they only address we could get would technically only be valid for 15 min.   If someone wants to donate to them, we can schedule a 15 minute window to execute the simulfunding process

FSF, EFF and Bitcoin Foundation should be fairly well-known within this community.  CCN (college cryptocurrency network) is a group that is trying to get college students involved in Bitcoin, which may very well pave the next generation of Bitcoin innovations and Bitcoin services.  After seeing what's going on at MIT, we wanted to help get as many young minds into Bitcoin as possible.

Chamber of Digital Commerce is very new, though it is headed by Perianne Boring which has been active in the community.  She is a former ... correspondent?  staffer?  lobbyist?  on Capital Hill, and has a tremendous amount of experience with public policy and lobbying.  Her organzation is trying to be a lobbyist on behalf of Bitcoin (in general), to make sure the intelligence/sanity is present in lawmaking and public policy related to Bitcoin. 

Fair point.  I was thinking more along the lines of security, but privacy needs to be respected as well.  I'm all for using PGP/GPG as much as possible, but it's not for everyone.  It took us a while in the company to figure out the best way to setup enigmail for maximizing the convenience factor while still keeping most of our operations encrypted.  

For this particular donation drive, at least the security is not reduced by foregoing email encryption.

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On that note, a quick story that seems quite relevant to the above and recent Bitcoin news:  

About a year ago I wanted to order a 1 oz gold coin from Coinabul.   It was about $1,500 worth of BTC.  When I went to checkout,  I noticed the website wasn't using SSL.  Yet, I was supposed to send my $1,500 to the address their server sent me without any crypto.  I emailed them asking to either make sure SSL was enabled, or at least send me a verification of the address through encrypted email.  The response I got was "


My response was not friendly.  I guess $1,500 is "fairly small" for him, but it isn't small for everyone.  And it's not a good excuse to run a precious metals site without basic web security.  I ended up ordering elsewhere, and I'm glad I did because it sounds like I wouldn't have gotten my gold coin...

You are free to use my email GPG key, 0xFB596985.  That address just gets forwarded to me. 

Though, strictly speaking, it shouldn't really be necessary.  The best a man-in-the-middle can do to your unsigned transaction is... swap out your contribution with his own...?  I don't think you'd have a problem with that    And on our side, as long as we see 0.5 from someone else we'll sign it, regardless of who is contributing it.

Simulfunding drive is moving, but slowly.   Gonna have to do some more marketing!

We're at 5.0 BTC in donations matched.  That's a total of 10 BTC donated!  (0.5 is in transit, so only 4.5 is represented on the webpage).  So we're at about 1/4 our goal. 

I rarely ask for money or donations explicitly, but I am asking now.  Double the value of a donation to an org/charity that supports Bitcoin, OSS and/or digital freedom! 

https://bitcoinarmory.com/donation-match-list/

As mentioned before:  there's only 5 organizations listed there, but also only 17.5 BTC worth of notes which leaves us with 2.5 for "other".  If you have different organization to which you want to donate, let me know!  I'm especially open to OpenSSL and wikipedia.  Though both of them will require a little coordination:  we will have to get a 15-minute payment address and do the simulfunding process within that 15 minutes.  Easy -- it only takes like 2 min -- but it will requires scheduling it.

A few things:

• 1.  The depedencies of Armory have not changed.  0.91+ has the exact same dependencies as 0.92+.   They even use the same database, so you shouldn't have to rebuild switching between them.
• 2.  Everything works on 12.04.3 and 12.04.4.  If it's an online system, skip the offline bundle and just grab the regular .deb file and install it on 12.04.4.  Ubuntu will determine what dependencies it needs and download them from the internet for you.
• 3.  If you already have a 12.04.3 or 12.04.4 installation on an offline computer and successfully run Armory, you no longer need to use the offline bundles to upgrade.  The offline bundle is only to provide the dependencies to the offline computer that it would otherwise download from the internet, and in the case of both 0.91 and 0.92, the included dependencies are for 12.04.3.  If you've run it before, it's already got the dependencies and you can just use the regular installer to upgrade.

I know this is confusing, but I'm doing my best to explain it anyway, so that hopefully you can make sense of what's going on on your system -- because I'm still not entirely clear what systems are setup where, online or offline, and what's installed, where your wallets are, etc.

The moral of the story is, if you've been running with 0.91.2, you shouldn't have to do anything fancy to upgrade to 0.92+.  *It should be just a matter of getting the new .deb file and installing it  (*user experience may vary).  We'll get it sorted out for you... eventually.  Still not sure why torrent is failing -- I just did a full start-from-scratch resync on Linux yesterday and it went smoothly (took about 7 hours total, though).  Log files always help.

By the way, have you checked your free disk space on the target machines?  Sometimes when there are strange issues getting things to work, it's because you're out of space.

Wow, thanks!   This is a very cool thread, and I'm glad to end up being part of it!

Indeed, that 500 mBTC is going to get 2x value because Armory will match the donation.  You just have to pick where you want the money to go and we can trustlessly simulfund the recipient.  Here is a list donations we're willing to match, and a tutorial for using Armory simulfunding to do it.  (And just for completeness, if you're interested in exploring Armory new decentralized multi-sig "Lockboxes", here's a full tutorial for that, too)

Since this thread is about giving, I will suggest that others donate to one of those organizations and let Armory double the value of your money (as it leaves your wallet)!  The page linked above includes 5 organizations:

• Free Software Foundation (FSF)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
• College Cryptocurrency Network
• Chamber of Digital Commerce
• Bitcoin Foundation

We have an extra 2.5 BTC reserved to match donations in excess of what's listed there, or if someone wants to donate to another org that you think we'd support.  For instance, we wanted to have the OpenSSL Foundation on the list, but they wouldn't fetch us a persistent address from their coinbase account.   However, if someone wants to donate to them anyway, I can schedule a time to get a 15-min address and execute the process (it literally takes 2 min).  That goes for any Coinbase- or BitPay-based donation target (wikipedia?).

Double the value of your bitcoins by donating to a an organization that promotes Bitcoin and digital freedom!

The Armory download page has a link to 12.04.3.  When you click on one of the offline bundles in the download table, read the text that shows up and you'll see the link.  Create a new VM based on that.

I suspect you grabbed the latest versino of 12.04 which is 12.04.4.  The website clarifies that the bundles were created before that and should be used with 12.04.3.  It has a download link to get 12.04.3.  I've been meaning to swap out the bundle packages so it will work with .4 but we just forgot to do it for 0.92

Currently there is not.  It's a bit of work to make new bundles, and we wanted to support older distros that are likely to work on older hardware.

Success, so far!

We got 3 BTC in donation matching so far in the first 24 hours!  (6 BTC total donated to EFF, CNC and CDC).  We have updated the listing on the donation match list:

https://bitcoinarmory.com/donation-match-list/

If you've upgraded to 0.92+ and you support the cause, please help out!  You can use any existing Armory wallets and balances, without any trouble or having to create/fund any new wallets or lockboxes.  The process just creates a regular transaction where only half the coins being spent belong to you.  The act of signing the transaction commits you if and only if we also sign it, which commits our funds as well.

You simply import one of the notes, add a note from one of your wallets of equal value, then sign it and send it to us.  The coins never leave your wallet if we never sign it (which commits our funds, too).    We posted some pretty thorough documentation here, and we'd appreciate the feedback on it.  

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@teste

1-4 are already part of the process.  The coins enter the lockbox, and stay there until they agree on what to do with them.  If they want to simply return the money back to themselves, they create a transaction doing so and both sign it.  If one party will get all the funds or some proportion of the funds, then they create such a transaction and both sign it.  There's no restrictions on what you can do with it once it's in the Lockbox.  And if not all coins are moved, the rest will remain in the Lockbox and still require multiple signatures.

#5 is not possible in an automated fashion (at least not without trust).  If the coins can't move until they both agree, any "automated" coin return process will give one party an edge to scam the other.  For instance, if it's buyer-seller escrow and the coins are supposed to go to the seller after 30 days, then the seller doesn't have to send the merchandise -- they just stop responding for 30 days and they get the money.

If you want #5, you must include a third-party who can arbitrate.  If the coins need to be moved and one party is uncooperative, the third-party can verify the terms of the agreement and help get the coins to where they're supposed to go.

Coincidentally, we had an internal conversation a couple months ago about trying to find USB devices that had "burned in" firmware.  My understanding was that the "dynamic" firmware on many USBs is a convenience to the manufacturers, but it is possible to get devices (and should be cheaper) to get one with firmware that can't be swapped.  I guess now is a good time to discuss those options and see if we can find a manufacturer that can guarantee that to be the case.

Of course there are other transfer methods that would be better (theoretically), but the USB capability is a boon for security-vs-convenience for most users.

Someone did post recently to the audio-cable comms thread with a decent xfer solution.  There was still some uncertainty about using it in less-controlled environments (i.e. making sure that both devices can "hear" each other).  But it was promising nonetheless.  If we can make it work, we'll make plugin that people can use for it.

Honestly, you don't really have a reason to.  There are no known security or issues with 0.91.2, and the biggest improvements outside of multisig were the OSX stability improvements.    The only other thing that changed was that we upgraded File-->Export Transaction History.  It did some erroneous things in 0.91.2, and now includes some extra data. 

Normally, I'd recommend you stay up to date, but given the disruption of having to upgrade multiple systems and no clear benefit for you, you're fine without it.  I'll let someone else chime in if I forgot about something important.  As long as you are using 0.91 or newer, you have the new announcement system and will be notified if there becomes an urgent need to upgrade.

It will be done in a way that you can continue to use your old wallets without any extra work.  The old address chains can still be extended, and can be watching-only.  Old backups will still work.  It will appear as an "imported wallet", and should behave the same as before.  We just won't have the option to create new wallets using the old algorithm or format.

We're working on a new wallet format (have been forever, but so many priorities have popped up since then).  After that release, new wallets will be BIP32 compatible, but will not work with older versions of Armory.  However, we plan to have a migrate feature to import the old wallet chains into the new wallet format so that you can continue to use old wallets with the new version.

Yes, the wallets are the same, and you can use any wallet on any version of Armory.  It's simply the communication protocol between online and offline computers (for signing transactions) that has changed, meaning that if you upgrade your online computer to 0.92, you will need to upgrade the offline computer as well (or keep a copy of 0.91.2 around just for doing offline transactions)

Good question!  Can you send us a log file?  You can do so through Help->Submit Bug Report (it will attach the file automatically).  Or go to bitcoinarmory.com/support and manually attach the file exported from Armory using File->Export Log File.

We'll check it out.

It was stated on the download page.  With a direct link to the 12.04.3 download.  It might've gotten lost in the upgrade to 0.92.  I'll make sure it gets back in there.